
Ask HN: Share an idea? - some_furry
If you&#x27;re like me, you often have a lot of ideas that you don&#x27;t have the time or resources to execute on.<p>If so, why not write it down for your fellow hackers&#x27; enjoyment?<p>Topics can be anything: product ideas, service ideas, blog post topics, stand up comedy skits, research initiatives you wish could get funded, etc.
======
stuntgoat
Pay for full time, beat-walking emergency medical technicians in shitty
neighborhoods. This would prevent a lot of unneeded hospital visits and offer
basic health services. A lot cheaper than 911 calls. I imagine having people
on the ground would prevent a lot of problems.

~~~
yishanl
Would this really be cheaper? It's an awful lot of man hours committed to just
one area vs. a centralized one that can dedicate the time/effort/resources
accordingly based on needs and corresponding urgency.

Also one of the bigger question would still be how would these EMTs have their
equipment with them + how would quality of care be ensured?

------
chejazi
Problem: Advertising is a big industry. Billions of dollars are spent to
bolster brand awareness and drive sales. Increasingly, advertising is digital
as consumers spend more time on phones, computers and tablets. Social
platforms like Facebook exploit user data for enormous profit, while all the
user gets is a “free” product. There is an opportunity for users to reclaim a
significant amount of this value, and in doing so realize a greater sense of
worth.

Mission: To measure and honor the value of every individual.

Vision: Corporations and Individuals providing value directly for each other.

Product: A URL shortening service for individuals to monetize the content they
share. Monetization occurs via an ad featured between the platform sharing the
short url (e.g. Facebook) and the site the short url takes the user to (the
content being shared).

~~~
starshadowx2
Do you mean like AdFly? - [https://adf.ly/](https://adf.ly/)

~~~
chejazi
AdFly is a competitor, but it is oriented toward publishers and advertisers.
Everyday people who share content can still use the service, but they will
have a difficult time clearing the $5 minimum payout amount.

~~~
starshadowx2
Maybe if you could make it happen automatically, but I don't see regular
people using a link shortener often. People sharing links on FB don't want to
have an extra step, they just want to share links. You'd also have to look at
the metadata stuff, the preview/Open Graph would just show your shortener
service and not the actual content which could lead to less clicks.

~~~
chejazi
I'm minimizing the complexity of the extra step with a browser extension. When
you open the extension, it hits an API with the current URL and gives you the
short URL. Ultimately, the goal is to make the service accessible on every
site, alongside the Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest buttons common in social
widgets.

I'm using tools similar to what social platforms use to aggregate metadata,
and embedding this information in the page, specifically for crawlers.
Facebook still gets the metadata, except it comes from my service and not the
original site.

------
PabloOsinaga
Amazing post-game experience for recreational athletes.

I play soccer recreationally. I've easily played more than 1,000 games and all
I have post-game are memories ( which are nice ), but I feel we could do much
better.

I have a vague idea for a solution - but it would involve drone-filming all my
recreational soccer games, and then have the content edited/produced - so I
could see al my plays, everyone else's best plays, and so on and so forth.

It would be really interesting because it would also augment the social in-
pitch experience with post-game online socialization.

What do you think?

~~~
tixocloud
Personally, I think this is a really interesting idea. Sadly, I came across an
article which initially focused on stats for recreational athletes and it
eventually fizzled out. Can't remember where I read it and not saying that
this idea will also fizzle out but it seems hard to get something going for
recreational athletes if there's a smaller chance of monetizing.

------
andrewstuart2
Netflix, but mostly decentralized. End users can be paid to allocate part of
their PC's storage toward movies and shows that they stream to their
neighbors, taking a lot of the load off the public backbones and central
servers.

Of course, these are encrypted and only decrypted (transcrypted?) when they're
transferred to someone nearby, intelligently based on `tracepath` or
something. My thought (may or may not be feasible) was that the central server
only gives you the public key for the data, and then provides the private key
and a new public key when the data is transmitted. I'm not sure that's even
possible with any level of secrecy, but if so it would remove a _lot_ of
redundant traffic and I imagine you could pay people less than you'd save on
bandwidth/peering if you could just pay them to P2P content (securely).

Get theaters involved in the initial distribution since they're everywhere and
have digital copies (and probably decent pipes).

Basically, my internet got really crappy every day at about 6 PM and I
imagined that 90% of my neighbors were streaming the same episodes of Breaking
Bad, and it bugged me that it wasn't just sent once and the distributed
locally.

~~~
ghayes
I am working on a project that let's you stream video / files peer to peer:
[https://fuego.link/](https://fuego.link/)

This project is early beta. It's written in Elixir using the Phoenix Framework
and uses React for the front-end. The source code is on GitHub:
[https://github.com/hayesgm/fuego](https://github.com/hayesgm/fuego)

The end goal is to make file / video sharing in a browser fully peer-to-peer,
similar to BitTorrent and cut out the middle-man. The project is open-source
to allow anyone to create mirrors for peer discovery.

I'm happy for any feedback.

------
rlease
1) An application that connects restaurant chefs and managers to local
farmers. Local farmers could upload their goods for the week on a marketplace
board, and chefs could find things that they would like to cook with for the
week and buy them. Typically chefs meet local purveyors at farmer's markets,
but for small enough producers, it would save them time and money to just have
their goods bought directly without having to go to a central market and run a
stand. Chefs would be able to order local goods similar to the way they order
through Sysco or FSA.

2) A dribble-like site for artisans. A site to showcase and upvote artisan
work and hopefully drive business to them. Baked goods, building airplanes,
cedar strip canoe building, kinetic sculptures, etc.

~~~
danieltillett
1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else)
can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how
much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests.
This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer
having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the
market and they know how much they will earn. Rather than grow the tasteless
varieties that crop and look good, they will grow the varieties that actually
taste good.

~~~
jqm
Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups
(churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at
least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I
suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes it could really be expanded outside of the just the restaurant business.
Having once had a garden where I grew my own heritage produce I really,
really, really miss the quality of those crops - the taste was just fantastic.
I now live in an apartment and would pay a significant premium to get someone
to supply them to me again.

One final tweak would be to allow people to also select organic growers as
well - I personally would not care, but I suspect it would be a big market for
this.

------
maverick2
A product hunt type website but for adding features to current app/websites.
User can thumbs up or down a feature request, and can also thumb-up a request
with some small money tagged to it. The money collected will go to a non
profit.

~~~
s986s
This slightly reminds me of bountry source

[https://www.bountysource.com/](https://www.bountysource.com/)

------
rayalez
\- Startup: create a universal and convenient micropayment system that would
allow content creators(writers, comics-artists, video creators) to monetize
their content. The problem now is that current systems suck, and each website
has it's own, so that it's not convenient for users to pay for content, they
have to enter credit card, or go to paypal, etc. There should be a nice
embeddable button that allows users to pay for watching a video or reading an
article in one click, on any website. Or maybe something even more elegant and
convenient.

\- Startup: xprize meets kickstarter. Or a reverse-kickstarter. You create and
back the project first, and then anyone can execute it and collect the reward.
People come up with projects they want to see happen, submit the idea. Anyone
can vote on the idea by sending some money. As a result you have a list of
user-created project ideas, ranked by how much money people deposited on them.
Anyone who completes a project gets all the money.

\- Project: A convenient website where users can add feature ideas, vote on
them, and discuss implementatuon. It would be a convenient way for developers
to prioritize which tasks to work on. Probably connected to git. Basically
like submitting issues, but it's feature ideas and it's ranked by importance.

\- In-browser markdown editor like on gitbook.com. Please somebody make this.
Ideally it would be open source, but I would totally pay for an opportunity to
use it on my website.

\- slant.co, but for things other than tech. Movies, books, music, whatever.
Or a similar open-source system so that I could spin up my own website with
this.

\- Awesome open source chat that I can embed on my website. Like chapp.is or
gitter.im

\- ELI5 for computer science and programming. Explain linear regression, ANN,
and other complicated concepts in short, simple terms.

-A robot simulator programming game where you control a virtual robot with your code. Targeted to CS and AI students. You could use this game to practice algorithms you are learning. Challenges(levels) are somewhat similar to AIMA exercises, or can be taken from berkeley AI class curriculum. Later you add a "competition" feature, where several teams program their robots to fight each other. Check out Screeps and Starcraft AI Tournament for inspiration. (the whole game is in the browser, robots are controlled with REST API so you could use any language.)

Send me an email to raymestalez@gmail.com if you are interested in working on
any of these. I know Django, I can contribute, especially if it's open source.

~~~
rayalez
Other stuff:

\- All text editors on android suck. My god they suck so much. Create
something like Editorial, and you have my money.

\- Not sure of it exists - betting website. Allow people to deposit money and
make small bets. Make it convenient for reddit users, so when 2 people are
arguing they could bet on a thing and see what will happen. Or target it to
fanfiction readers, to bet on what will happen in the following chapters(would
be super useful for /r/HPMOR)

\- Website - a collection of ways to make people's lives weirder. Something
like pranks, or ways to mess with people's heads, but harmless, funny, and
innocent. Stuff that Harry from HPMOR does.

\- Use ML and CV and image recognition to do something cool with google maps.
It's just an interesting idea, use CV to analyze google maps data.

\- Subreddit recommendation engine. Based on your likes and subscriptions.
Like on imdb.

\- gitter for subreddits. Connect a subreddit to a chat.

\- HN-lore. There are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every
6 months new people discover them. Great stories people here like sharing,
articles, books, etc. Create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.

\- Automatically compile my HN, reddit, other social media posts into a blog-
like post feed.

\- Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for movies and animation projects. It would
be a big kill-Hollywood kind of startup, not sure about how to make this at
all, but we should turn movie industry into a github/reddit-like thing. Just a
dream I guess.

~~~
dagw
_Use ML and CV and image recognition to do something cool with google maps. It
's just an interesting idea, use CV to analyze google maps data._

As someone working with something vaguely related to this sort of thing. Let
me just say, use Open Street Maps. Google mapping data and the licensing
thereof is a huge pain and often straight up impossible. Don't lock yourself
into developing something for a platform where you will be forbidden from
selling or even distributing the fruits of your labor. Plus with OSM you get
direct access to the underlying vector data, which in most cases will save you
an arduous and error prone processing step

Other than that, the whole field is wide open for all kinds of awesome ideas.

------
gamegoblin
Shazam for fonts. Point your phone camera at some text and it tells you the
top N fonts it thinks it is with C% confidence.

Niche market for graphic designers.

There's the website What The Font [1], but it's not a super user friendly app
like Shazam.

I think the hardest part of this would be the huge amount of time it'd take to
get a good dataset and train whatever machine learning model you'd probably
wind up using.

[1]
[https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/)

~~~
danieltillett
Nice idea. I think you will find the hardest thing will be that so many
typefaces are near clones of each other. It might be easier to just match to
the closest open source typeface.

~~~
gamegoblin
Definitely true. That's why you'd have to print out the top N fonts it thinks
it's similar to.

Something like

    
    
        1. Foo Bar Lite Italic - 99.1%
        2. Foo Bar Italic - 97.2%
        3. Baz Bar Lite Italic - 97.0%
        4. Foo Baz Italic - 95.4%
        ... etc maybe give the top 10 or so ...
    

Another problem is many logos and whatnot have been hand-tweaked from their
original font.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes it is a hard problem. It might be worth trying on a small scale with a few
close typefaces to see how hard it is to separate them and what sort of
accuracy could be achieved.

~~~
brador
Definately not a hard problem. For logos, impossible because of customisation,
but for regular text, it's simple. Capture image, make a box around text, warp
to flatten, highten contrast, split characters, process characters for
features, check against database of known features of fonts. It's similar to a
facial recognition algorithm.

Problem is no monetization potential, so it's hobby project level.

~~~
danieltillett
I think you are under estimating how similar many typefaces are to each other.
When even human experts have a hard time determining which typeface is which
you know it is a hard problem.

I do agree 100% with you that any such product would be impossible to
monetarise. I would certainly like to use it so I hope someone makes it.

~~~
brador
> When even human experts have a hard time determining which typeface is which
> you know it is a hard problem

A font is just a series of images with standardised traits. Computers are
great at recognising these traits, and perfect for cross comparing them. It's
just pixels.

------
kephra
I sometimes even registered the domains, e.g. toothing.org The name offers
various cell phone games, even the toothing hoax itself.

The next odd idea requires expert knowledge in Babylonian contracts. Every
change of ownership without a contract was theft. Contracts involving people
required a cancel clause for each side. And ownership on people without
contract was punished by death, as illegal slavery. So most contracts are
marriages. The contracts are highly formalized, so one can use them as
templates and exchange the names. Print them on a clay tablet, burn them, and
send them by mail. I'm sure marriage contracts would sell, especially those
with the cancel clause: "and when she says you are no longer my man, he can
throw her into the river".

The 3rd and most challenging idea would be a project and freelancer site that
does not suck. Where projects, prices and skills do not race to the bottom.

And last _shameless plug about something real_ You can contact me on #o3db @
irc.freenode.net - currently developing a Browser-4GL in Scheme.

------
lewisl9029
Here's my pet idea for a hardware product I'd totally use:

A Google Glass like device without most of the functionality (no camera or
mics) or processing hardware (doesn't have to run its own OS), except the
display (this should cut down costs quite a bit and make it a bit more
feasible to manufacturer and purchase than Google Glass itself).

You connect devices to it using Miracast and/or some other wireless display
tech and extend/mirror your smartphone/laptop displays.

It can serve as a portable multi-monitor setup for productivity, or a simple
portable heads-up display for entertainment (video playback, reading) or
utility uses (navigation).

That'd be the MVP anyways. In future revisions you can maybe add things like a
mic and/or camera for things like augmented reality and voice control, but
figure out how to offload the processing to the master device
(laptop/smartphone) rather than dedicating hardware to it on the device itself
for affordability and battery life.

------
fivedogit
For the love of God, someone create a World of Warcraft where the quests are
educational. Instead of "go kill 8 green dragons" the questiver says "Mata a 8
dragones verdes". The immersion and addiction to progression (i.e. unholy
motivation) would have us speaking multiple languages in no time.

Please. I'm begging you to take my money.

------
phalgunr
An Amazon for renting things. All the top Google search results looked
antiquated..

edit: my search query was just "rent anything"

~~~
robzyb
That sounds like a bad idea from a counter-party risk perspective.

But I suppose so did AirBnB.

~~~
danieltillett
Everyone says AirBnB was a bad idea, but only the original idea was bad. Once
you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the
risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

~~~
robzyb
> Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels
> where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

No, thats exactly why I'd say it was a bad idea, because who would accept that
outsourced risk?!

(It turns out a lot of people did)

~~~
danieltillett
The original idea was for people to share their home or room to strangers.
This was not a good idea, but pivoting into the illegal hotel business where
the properties are continually rented was a good idea - at least until there
is a major crackdown.

------
andymurd
Rooftop solar has really taken off here in Australia, and around 20-25% of
houses have a solar inverter. Is it practical to build a cheap rooftop wind-
power harvester that plugs into the inverter?

~~~
danieltillett
The killer here is likely to be planning restrictions. The other problem is
wind is actually more efficient when centralised. The large turbines that our
PM hates so much are much more efficient than small turbines.

~~~
andymurd
Agreed on both points.

With planning restrictions, I hope that something small and noise-free could
please the nimbyists. Something(s) the size of a Dyson fan on the roof-line
would look cool.

With regards efficiency, I think it's not about replacing the large
centralised turbines but augmenting the house's existing solar. A typical
single solar panel that generates 200w peak makes about 500Wh/day (on sunny
days). If (big if) a turbine can generate 20w average over 24 hours, that's
480Wh extra.

But as @desdiv correctly points out - the idea is nothing new. Here's a good
looking 20w turbine that I would be happy to have on my roof:

[http://wind-kinetic.com/index.php/other-products/polar-20w-3...](http://wind-
kinetic.com/index.php/other-products/polar-20w-3.html)

~~~
danieltillett
My memory is a bit hazy on this, but I think that turbines place a lot of
stress on buildings that they were not designed to handle. Retrofitting the
required strength into the building will be expensive given what our tradies
charge.

------
peterburkimsher
A mobile app platform based on images. Keep a basic JavaScript bookmarklet to
decode the images into HTML, so they become browser-based apps. Store
everything in the 50MB of cache-manifest. Use the same apps on iOS, Android,
etc. Evade parental controls and device restrictions on app stores. Copy app-
images directly between phones. I call it "Fondant", meaning "chocolate
coated". Because I can have chocolate coated Apple, and chocolate coated Jelly
Bean/Lollipop, etc.

------
vishalzone2002
1\. deliver organic and healthy food at airports and hotels. When a user
checks in for boarding pass, the delivery is ready. One delivery per flight..

2\. building your own store curated from your favorite brands only. Every user
gets discount on their fav brand and there is a limit to number of brands

3\. Hire a local "expert" to build your itinerary when you are visiting that
local's town/city.

4\. An new email platform built with UI in mind for non-personal emails like
newsletters, marketing offers, etc.

happy to work with or share more.

~~~
aml183
Hey. We are building #3. Email me at me@arilewis.com if you want to chat about
it.

------
adventured
Indoor almond farms

I don't mean as a hobby. Industrial scale, genetically modifying the almond
trees for better indoor results.

Global demand for almonds will continue to vastly outstrip what California can
handle via traditional outdoor growing. That would have likely happened even
without the drought. The water requirements will place a cap on the almond
industry's growth. The solution is drastically more efficient indoor growing.

~~~
danieltillett
Wouldn't the simpler solution be just move the Almond industry out of
California to somewhere with better water?

~~~
jqm
My understanding is there are only a few areas in the world climate suitable
for commercial almond farming. Among them Spain, areas of Australia and
California (which produces most of the worlds almonds). Move the Alfalfa
first. It uses in sum more California water than almonds and you can grow it
in many locations.

Incidentally, the idea of growing almonds indoors is just plain nuts:)

You would have to have a lot of indoor space and the return would likely not
even close to cover the cost. Ever. Even if almonds cost 5 times as much. Even
if you bred little tiny almond trees (which could probably be done as they
have miniature peach trees and vertical espelied peach trees and almonds are
essentially a type of peach pit)

~~~
danieltillett
The areas that are suitable is a function of the price. If the Californian
Almond industry runs out of water then other more marginal areas will become
viable.

~~~
jqm
They require a certain climate. That's why they aren't already being
commercially planted in other places which they would be at current high
prices if commercial production in those places were viable.

The media like to beat up on California nuts. But really, the largest and most
unnecessary user of California water is Alfalfa. That is the low hanging fruit
(no pun intended) in water savings.

~~~
danieltillett
Growing rice is also insane.

Yes the major problem with water in California is its current ownership and
pricing. Almonds should be near the top of the most productive agricultural
uses of water. Almonds also look rather nice - certainly much more interesting
than alfalfa.

------
YogeeKnows
Glasses which become opaque when kissing love making scene pops up in Hunger
games sequels, bcos some parents want those scenes to be censored out when
they are watching the movie in theater with their young ones.

------
s986s
Verlet physics engine that supports

1) collisions

2) contraining particles by the area/volume

3) creating 'areas' that create and destroy particles based off forces
effecting it and whether or not the two lines connecting two particles are
parallel

------
hellbanner
Decentralized supply-chain system with cryptocurrency escrows, crowdsourced
delivery drivers and crowdsourced video verification of delivery verification.

~~~
danieltillett
I am sure no one would use this to buy and sell illicit substances. Anyone
thinking of working on this idea had better be pretty good at not revealing
who they are.

~~~
hellbanner
Whatever, same argument as cash enables crime. Cars enable drive-bys & bank
robberies.

I'm thinking of automated industrial supply chains. Robot delivery cars for
mass factories, automated checking on deliveries.

------
dulse
1) A lightweight CRM for friends. I'd love a tool that takes the teachings of
someone like Keith Ferrazzi and builds a simple tool around making it much
easier for me to be a better networker. Facebook doesn't quite get the use
cases right, and neither does linkedin, and other CRMs are too heavy weight to
be practical. Maybe with tips on managing my professional networking life in
addition to my individual relationships (eg, suggest among my network a group
of 4 that would make a good dinner party, and see that I haven't done a dinner
party in a while and suggest to send an invite to the group). Or, tell it a
handful of aspirational goals (work at Google, start a company, go to YC) and
have it suggest a path to get closer to that goal by probing my network,
discreetly connect me to others with similar or complimentary goals, suggest
when I can help someone that has a goal that's close to my expertise, etc.

2) It would be really cool to get the 'magic' of the command line into the
hands of everyday people that don't even know what it is. Magic sort of does
with with SMS. I'd love to see an app toy that you totally interact with by
emailing it. Then you could email it for all sorts of automated things -- :bcc
the app to log data, send it an email for reminders, simple commands could be
parsed and understood. It wouldn't have to do a bunch of NLP at first, you
could be strict about how the data needs to be formatted for it to work.

3) This one is nebulous, but I think software discovery for the enterprise is
really broken right now. There is still WAY too much outbound phone sales and
old fashion 'network' selling going on. There should be some place I could go
as, say, a sales ops manager to check out the best software eating the uses
cases for sales operations (Ambition, BaseCRM, Yesware, etc etc). Maybe it's
product hunt style group voting. Maybe it's a curated, impartial look into the
'stacks' of the industry companies that are considered 'best in class'. Maybe
it's something looking at Google trend data and finding 'momentum' sort of
like Mattermark. Maybe it's a 'pagerank' style connection map by looking at VC
investors and the 'client' pages of startups. I dunno the best way to get good
information that scales and nimbly identifies new ideas when they emerge, but
if you figured out that problem you'd be solving a huge, very real problem and
be in the middle of what will be billions of dollars in $ shifting around in
the next 10-20 years. Search like Google works when you already know what you
want, but it's really hard to distinguish the signal and noise with all the
new tech and tools and toys emerging to take over different use cases for
large companies. And the people in the large companies that need to know this
information often don't have enough time to do the research or even where to
begin.

~~~
vishalzone2002
+1 for #3. I was working very actively on that problem about a year ago. The
issue is to scale such thing with current way. Also typical chicken and egg
problem

~~~
dulse
Interesting. What was the project? I'd love to learn more about it. Feel free
to email me if you don't want to leave info in comment thread (email is in my
profile).

I think the scale issue is a technology problem... it's finding the right
algorithm or model that scales itself vs. being human driven. You might be
able to do the latter for a while to build the audience, though, and slowly
replace it with the former over time (to help with chicken / egg problem).

