
My list of ideas, if you're looking for inspiration - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/My+list+of+ideas+for+when+you+are+looking+for+inspiration
======
user24
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>

~~~
jacquesm
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!

~~~
user24
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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 :)

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

------
djm
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 :)

~~~
Kliment
> 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.

~~~
djm
That was it, thank you

------
richardw
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.

~~~
danohuiginn
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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.

------
bho
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.

~~~
danohuiginn
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.

------
jackowayed
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.

~~~
loewenskind
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.

------
KoZeN
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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 :)

~~~
KoZeN
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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

~~~
KoZeN
_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.

~~~
jacquesm
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).

------
alain94040
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.

------
computator
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
prawn
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).

~~~
jacquesm
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).

~~~
prawn
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.

~~~
danohuiginn
<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.

------
Sukotto
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.

------
hasenj
ArticleBody already exists, it's called Readability:

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

It's a bookmarklet

------
danohuiginn
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

------
dolphenstein
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...

------
thetrumanshow
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 ;).

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
Robin_Message
(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!

------
nitrogen
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>

------
bambax
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.

------
nhebb
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.

~~~
ifesdjeen
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.

------
prawn
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!

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

~~~
prawn
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.

------
lincolnq
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.)

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

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
smallegan
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 ;-)

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

------
Brashman
(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.

------
_mattb
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?

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
gojomo
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).

------
devmonk
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.

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

~~~
wallflower
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?'

~~~
devmonk
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!

------
PStamatiou
They made ordered lists for things like this. :)

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

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bhickey
SequenceHunter exists. It's called BLAST.

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

------
cromulent
Number 52 (SoftBricks) reminded me of Bug Labs.

<http://www.buglabs.net/products>

~~~
jacquesm
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.

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

------
synnik
"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!

------
yters
Post your ideas on HN and see what gets upvoted.

Tag: HB HN (half baked hacker news)

------
J3L2404
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?

~~~
ronnier
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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 ?

~~~
ronnier
Sure, that's fine.

------
korch
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.

~~~
fbailey
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

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

~~~
jacquesm
I am getting lots of reactions!

Mostly by mail, but plenty here too.

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

~~~
phpnode
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.

~~~
danohuiginn
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.

