
Ask HN: Idea Sunday - rokhayakebe
A small HN experiment. Every Sunday, a thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on.
======
raldi
A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too
much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a
little voting widget next to each message:

    
    
        +------------------------------------+
        | 4,376 people received this message |
        |                                    |
        | [Cool, it was ]   [It was a waste] |
        | [important and]   [of my time to ] |
        | [worthy of our]   [  read this   ] |
        | [    time     ]   [   message    ] |
        |                                    |
        +------------------------------------+
    

Then, as votes are collected, the sender (and maybe everyone else) gets some
kind of feedback on how their message was received. Maybe the report could
include a total of how much time was spent reading it: "Your coworkers spent a
total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in
employee time. Sending it was therefore a moderately bad use of company
resources" .. or, if the voting was favorable, "1722 of your coworkers enjoyed
reading your message. When you were deciding whether to hit Send or Discard,
you made the right choice in clicking Send."

Edit: As I've said in the past when posting ideas on HN, if you think this is
worth doing, please run with it! I make no claim on "owning" the idea, and all
I ask is that if it makes you a billionaire, you commission of bust of me to
install in your parlor. (Bronze or marble only, please.)

~~~
jiggy2011
Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their
bosses emails as a waste of time. Also in large corporations a lot of long
emails will be sent that relate to company policies etc that nobody reads in
practice but the purpose of the email is that it protects the company in the
event that an employee says they were not aware of policy X.

~~~
raldi
_> Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote
their bosses emails as a waste of time._

Are you kidding? That's the whole point!

Presumably, the boss allowing it in the first place is a signal that they're
interested in this feedback from their employees.

~~~
jiggy2011
Yes and no, corporate politics is a minefield and often subtle.

------
gfosco
I want to search for furniture, and other products, based on dimensions. My
girlfriend and I furnished a new apartment recently, and had to be space
conscious.. This spot next to the couch could fit a 10" wide table. It's not
easy to search for that, yet the information is there. My original plan was
going to use the Amazon API and take a search term and page through looking
for dimensions that fit. I still think it's a great idea, but obviously not
huge, and I don't really have time to build it. If you do, hook me up.

~~~
d0m
Taking a pic of your room and seeing nice furniture virtually added so you can
easily test different styles.

~~~
xur17
In college, my senior project involved a 3d room designer using the Kinect and
a laptop. You could position virtual 3d objects (couches, lamps, etc) in the
room, and move the camera around to see how the virtualized items looked.

~~~
xerophtye
that sounds so freaking cool :D

------
quaunaut
This is less an idea, more something for someone to think about.

We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect.

Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of
people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive
discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting
extreme rhetoric?

Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitably see the "How bout dem
Cowboys" problem, where it seems like the point of discussion is more to get
the most approval instead of trying to argue a point, and where anyone with a
disagreeing opinion feels unwelcome even if they're willing to put a lot of
effort into their response?

I haven't quite figured out how to solve it, but I really want to. I've been a
part of several online communities like that now, and it always ends up the
same way. Once it gets big enough, finding good conversation gets very rare.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think you misunderstand communities. Vibrant communities are full of people
who share a materially common set of opinions about various things. They
engage and interact within that world view.

At the same time people evolve and communities evolve. Sometimes you move away
from the community, sometimes they move away from you. Either way, you can end
up feeling like an outsider in a group you once considered yourself to be part
of the 'in' crowd.

Because a large part of anyone's current point of view is driven by past
experience, communities often segment by age but sometimes segment by politics
or world events (the mechanism is that people take away different things from
the same experience, it "changes" them in different ways, and that puts into
further out or closer to other members of the community.

The internet "echo chamber effect" as you call it is defeated by visiting
multiple communities and watching and noting the differences. That your
favorite 'hang out' on the Internet has become distasteful to you can no more
be "fixed" than you can will your favorite eatery or bar to exist for all
time.

Things change, people change, places change. Keep moving and an open mind.

~~~
sakagami0
Speaking for Reddit, it was an unfortunate consequence of the pseudonymous and
point system. As communities got larger, there would be less and less
tolerance for discussion and focus would stray towards quick (easily digested)
posts.

Although, the counter point is that people in general are less likely to
produce discussion. Or, that a lack there of of easily digested posts invokes
discussion.

~~~
ChuckMcM
So does the karma/points thing make it an attractive nusiance for trolls? It
does seem to encourage participation which is one of the challenges of any
community (way more lurkers than speakers)

------
hooande
A solution for the "too many tabs open" problem. Need a way to save my history
in an organized and interactive manner, with a nice looking UI. Sort of like
the old WebMynd ([http://webmynd.com](http://webmynd.com)). I find that most
of my tabs are open as a form of reminder. If I close it, I'll forget it and
might as well not have seen it. Same if I hide it away in some kind of
bookmarking app. I think it would be best to apply a UI layer over my entire
history in a way that makes it easy to search and recall things that I found
interesting int he past.

Need to store all data locally for privacy reasons, and have a way to
logically group urls by content and bring them back to the front occasionally
(maybe with some kind of gamification?) so they don't disappear.

~~~
uptown
If you use Chrome, check out OneTab.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall)

~~~
larrybolt
I love how OneTab works, and it was something I used very frequently. But one
day, not sure why exactly my chrome profile folder (osx mac) got corrupted. I
cannot give technical details about it really, but not a single one of the
chrome addons I had worked any longer. And I tried to recover the tab sessions
but was unsuccessful.

If there is a feature OneTab is missing, it's to sync your tabs/sessions to a
certain location. Or at least that's a feature I'd really appreciate!

~~~
GVRV
It provides an export as a text file on the 'One Tab' page in the right hand
corner. I wrote a small Python script to parse this text file and upload all
my tabs to Pinboard.

~~~
carl-platt
care to share the script?

~~~
austengary
I'm with this guy

~~~
samstave
+1

------
nemo1618
I have a strange fascination with knowing exactly how I discovered a
particular artist, film, website, etc.

I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user
reached a given site. Then they could go back later and input, say, a YouTube
URL, and it would show exactly what lead them to that song.

I started writing such an extension myself, but I was clearly out of my
element. So when Mozilla shut down their Firefox Add-on Builder, I lost
motivation completely. For someone with experience created extensions, though,
I imagine this would be pretty straightforward.

EDIT: no, using the browser history is not good enough. Browsing is a non-
linear activity (especially with multiple tabs open), and to visualize your
path through the web you need a graph, not just a list of sites.

~~~
lucb1e
> "I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user
> reached a given site."

I used to love to have this. I called it "browser history", but then Mozilla
decided it made the browser so terribly slow that you can now no longer really
configure how long history is retained. After a while it just disappears.

I used to have my history all the way back from 2006...

~~~
achal
Is this true? I checked and I seemed to have lost my history from before 2012,
and assumed I'd messed up somewhere in transitioning between computers. I
couldn't find any info about Firefox doing this (arbitrarily deleting history
from the past), but I'm almost sure it does.

Edit: This time I found it:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Places_async_expir...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Places_async_expiration)

I find it rather annoying, however, that this isn't obvious. I like keeping
all my history :( I'd rather I could at least keep the history _somewhere_ ,
even if it didn't stay in Firefox's history view.

~~~
icebraining
Well, it's stored in a simple sqlite file (places.sqlite), so you can just do
regular backups or import it into another DB.

------
rokhayakebe
Keep Writing. I, sometimes, would like to write on a subject but I fear no one
will read the material. If I had X people simply suggest to "keep writing" I
would be more willing. Keep writing is something like Medium but it allows
someone to post text (news, fiction, stories, anything) that is not complete.
Writers set a (hidden) number of votes they should reach before they keep
going then they publish what they currently have.

~~~
namanyayg
I'm interested, but where would an author get people to vote on the piece?
While a fiction story could get votes from various communities, I imagine it
would fail for specific posts? Feel free to email, mail at namanyayg dot com

~~~
rokhayakebe
I think it could be a simple like button, hence it could be anywhere. You
could also build the platform to write and publish if you wanted, but
regardless of where it is it would work the same. I will email you.

------
Spittie
I've been having this in my mind for a while:

A nice way to organize & share my knowledge. I know that lots of people have a
self-hosted wiki or similar where they write nice tricks, something that they
learned about and might be useful in the future, nice ideas...

Well, I'd like something like this, but more "social". Pages could be shared
(or public), anyone could write a comments on something (I'd love to see
comments a-la Medium), and it would be nifty to have a way to "fork" and
submit a pull request for every page.

I guess it could also have the usual "follow user" that will show all of his
pages in a dashboard, a "trending pages" for the most seen pages and similar.

~~~
myrdev
It isn't really the normal use for it, but I made my own subreddit for this -
I only use it as a personal repository of information, but it would suit
pretty much all of your requirements, and it has stats on usage etc built in
:P

~~~
Spittie
This went over my mind, but I've read about other people using a subreddit for
that. Indeed, it looks like a nice option - free, can add content (using
markdown!), other people can comment/vote on it, easy searchable.

------
d0m
Idea: Airbnb for food. An app where you buy meals cooked by your neighbors.

I see two big trends these days.

1) People seems more willing to connect back with their neighbors and
community.

2) People have less time but want to eat more healthy.

Imagine this scenario:

While going back home, a student could check on the app what's available to
eat for tonight. Next to his place, there's a family willing to sell the extra
tacos for a few bucks. The student would then just stop by and pick them up.

Obviously, there would be quality rating and the possibility to reserve a few
days in advance.

~~~
BadCookie
Major legal problems with this, unfortunately (at least in the US). You pretty
much HAVE to have a commercial kitchen in order to legally sell food in the
United States, as well as be licensed by the state. It is cost prohibitive.
Some states have what are called "cottage food laws" that enable individuals
to sell food cooked in their home kitchens on a small scale, but there are
many restrictions. (For example, in my state, you cannot own any pets, and the
food can't be the sort that goes bad if you don't refrigerate it.)

Granted, what Airbnb does isn't altogether legal much of the time, but food
safety is taken much more seriously than hotel taxes and zoning laws. If you
did build a startup like this, the second it started to become popular, I
expect that you would get shut down.

~~~
foolinaround
What if there is no money involved in this, but more of an exchange/barter
with points? If a point was roughly equal to a cent, then imagine the
neighbour makes 3 tacos that could be 500 points... This student then will
offer up a $25 Amazon gift card that is worth $25 to him, that he could offer
for sale on this site (like ebay) and he gets to keep his points which he can
barter.. At no point is cash redeemed/exchanged.

Does this break any of the various regulatory laws in place?

~~~
BadCookie
The laws are at the state level, so you'd have to dig deep into your
particular state's laws to find out for sure (or hire a lawyer to do it). But
since the concern is about foodborne illness, I suspect that you will run into
a problem with the law in any case where you are offering food to the public
that was not cooked under your state's watchful eye, regardless of your
particular compensation scheme or lack thereof.

I am aware of one way around this, though (sort of). As I recall, if you come
to my house and cook food for me in my kitchen, then I can pay you and
everything is fine. I don't think you even need a food handler's license. But
obviously, that's a lot less convenient for both of us.

I'm no expert on this topic. I've just looked into it enough to get
discouraged!

------
gamegoblin
A programmer social network. I find myself with two distinct sets of friends
on Facebook: my tech friends and my normal friends. With my tech friends, I
just want to post neat snippets of code as statuses and share github gists on
walls and whatnot. So I'd like basically github with more social elements
thrown in.

Imagine seeing a cool repo, then being able to friend the owner, and open a
chat box to have a quick chat about it right there on the page rather than
having to go to another communication method.

EDIT: I know this super similar to github. Really I just want github to
implement the equivalent of friends, chats, and public profiles people can
post things to (a la facebook wall).

~~~
pekk
This could be solved by something like Google Plus, if circles could be
defined by topics that people subscribe to rather than by people you want to
send a message to.

e.g.: I want to know what Jim thinks about coding, but not politics

~~~
bgp
What you describe sounds like the existing Communities feature, but until
there is code block formatting in posts it'll still be a pain to read code in
G+

------
covercash
Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame
Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that
advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.

edit: Seems like there is some interest in this. If anyone wants to discuss
this more, email my username at me.com

~~~
rokhayakebe
This extends to regular quality programming as well.

Sometimes I spend 30 minutes looking for a good movie before giving up and
watching The Bourne Supremacy again because at least I know I won't regret the
2 hours I invest in it.

I would pay $1 bounty every time someone just recommended a good movie that I
end up liking.

~~~
icebraining
Criticker solved that problem for me. You do have to invest a little time
rating movies you've already seen, though.

------
larrys
An app that allows you to have a meeting with someone anytime both of you're
available for the meeting.

So it's schedule-less.

Example:

You want to talk to Paul. Paul wants to talk to you. But not as much.

Paul is ranked "a1" in your book and you are ranked "b5" in Paul's book.

Paul notes that he is in a "b5 and above" time period. Maybe he just got done
exercise so he is more interested in talking to anyone (you are a b5 after
all). Or maybe he is sitting in the dentists waiting room and has time to kill
and is ok if he has to stop the conversation right away abruptly.

In your book Paul is an "a1" so he can call in the middle of the night and you
will take the call.

Paul marks his availability as "b5 and above" and then app proceeds to start
to contact anyone who matches.

Someone else is ahead of you at b3 so they get the first call. Next guy is at
b4 but he doesn't answer. So you are next at b5 and your phone rings and it's
Paul.

You have your conversation.

Advantage: No need to schedule calls by time. They happen by importance.

With granularity on both sides.

Why I like this:

I can make the most efficient use of time. Some people are more important and
you want to take the call anytime anyplace. Others are less important and you
are more picky. Also ability to use time that normally goes to waste. And
prevents you from having to think "I've got a minute who should I call".

~~~
kybernetikos
I really like this idea, although I'd be unlikely to mark my availability
often. Maybe have a 'get me a meeting now' button, which raises your
availability until a meeting matches.

~~~
larrys
That's part of the idea. You don't map anything out. You hit a button that
says literally "get me a meeting now" but further you can give it an idea of
the level of importance of the meeting you want "now".

Using the example I have given elsewhere if you are waiting for a plane that
might take off in 10 minutes you don't want to call someone that you can't
quickly get off the phone with. (You don't want to be rude to someone
important). Otoh the person pitching you or the local realtor that you know
that you need to check in with is the type that you can say "hey have to catch
my plane talk to you later" (or your aunt). Or the guy at Home Depot with the
size of the garden hose.

------
edw519

      - When will the next bus/train be at this spot?
      - a non-DRM ebook reader with Project Gutenburg installed
      - auto convert from client/server to webapp or phoneapp
      - grocery delivery for us not in SV,Seattle,etc
      - reservation-only restaurants that have tables avail now
      - auto turn cell phone to vibrate in certain locations
      - auto forward cell phone to close land line (work/home)
      - old Google maps
      - a no wifi or cell Palm Pilot replacement
      - cell phone direct to .txt email for all but certain callers
      - mini-blogging platform: 400 chars < every post < 800 chars
      - yelp you can actually believe
      - forum software that filters trolls
      - forum software that filters idiots
      - salad bar locator
      - buffet locator
      - televisionless / audioless restaurant locater
      - chess with n moves forward/back what if 
      - shock nearby driver on cell phone not paying attention
      - missing commercial airliner locator

~~~
ilaksh
One thing I have noticed is that if I look at my phone while driving but hold
it lower out of sight no one reacts. But if I hold the phone up so I can
actually see where I am driving while glancing at the phone, people honk and
act like they want to kill me. So I often just try to hide it, even though I
feel much safer holding it up so that it is in the same field of view as the
road. So this is an example where people think they are helping righteously
but they are actually making the road more dangerous.

Anyway I think that cars should come with heads up displays that overlay
information on or in front of the windshield in front of you without obscuring
the road.

Also I should get a hands-free setup.

~~~
jarofgreen
> but they are actually making the road more dangerous

Or you could just stop using your cellphone when driving instead of
rationalising the blame onto others?

> Anyway I think that cars should come with heads up displays that overlay
> information on or in front of the windshield in front of you without
> obscuring the road.

Yes, for instance some cars are designed to put things like speed indicator
just below screen, but most bury them behind the steering wheel where it's
hard to see, never understood why.

------
jw2013
Many people on hacker news have explicitly asked for this: a platform for
listing your open-source project that needs contributors. I tried here:

[https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute](https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute)

But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any
promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really
appreciate it.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
The monthly "who's hiring" guy should post "which open source project need
help" as well.

~~~
NoodleIncident
It's a bot, but agreed :)

------
jonsen
Downloadable sounds for electric cars.

 _Electric cars must make noise under new EU rules:_

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26857743](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-26857743)

~~~
lukasm
blink and sound when the pedestrian is detected is way better for him/her and
the driver.

~~~
jonsen
Would really make an impression passing along a crowded sidewalk :)

------
3rd3
How about a program that watches for certain input patterns, takes calendar,
location and maybe camera data to determine the best times to deliver push and
email notifications without interrupting.

Maybe one could figure out moments at which the user would be interrupted the
most, for example shortly after opening a new window or tab, or shortly after
switching programs, since these moments are risky for forgetting things (if
the same psychology applies):
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571267#.Uz60U8cve2w)

It would probably make sense to prohibit interruptions during intense writing.
I also thought about an option to blacklist certain apps or websites like
Skype, Facetime etc. and to whitelist activities that don’t require focus like
browsing news websites or playing a game.

------
kybernetikos
A service for blind/partially sighted people where they can use a smart phone
to connect to a service where volunteers (if any are connected) describe what
they can see from the video streamed from the smart phone.

The volunteers are given ratings afterwards, and their video streams checked
against their descriptions by other volunteers.

Monetized later via a paid service where the person is reliably connected to
trained describers rather than volunteers.

~~~
khebbie
Have a look at bemyeyes.org it is just that its in public beta:
[https://beta.bemyeyes.org](https://beta.bemyeyes.org)

------
psycr
A web API that consumes phone camera captured photos of nutritional labels,
and spits back a structured JSON response of the data.

Primary consumers would be developers who're building products that depend on
the user inputting this type of data - or warehouse logistics companies who
could catalog this sort of data and middleman it to everyone else.

~~~
karangoeluw
Dibs. I'll start working on it. If anyone wants to help out, message me or
email me karan[at]goel.im

~~~
napoleond
(Apologies if you're an OCR guru and this is a stupid comment, but...) I
wonder if it would be easier to get an MVP together using Amazon Mechanical
Turk. A quick Google search reveals that there are lots of commercial products
providing OCR on nutrition labels, but getting open source OCR to work
reliably with phone-quality images (poor lighting, curvature of containers,
etc) is tricky.

Either way, I think OCR-as-a-service would be really useful, and nutrition
labels are probably a great place to start. I think there's lots of room for
improvement in the nutrition/meal planning space.

~~~
total
I know FoodEssentials used to do this on mTurk. I did them myself on that
platform. They haven't been around in a while, though. I'd be more than happy
to enter nutritional label information on mTurk should that method be chosen.

------
jacabado
This adresses a pain that I suffer:

An app to easily compare SQL execution plans.

I believe the better way would be graphical. I have needed this on MS SQL
Server, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer has helped but lacks this comparison. Today I
do it by diffin execution plans on XML format.

On my wildest dreams I would have a REPL accepting a DSL that would allow me
to query the different DMV's (those are SQL Server data management views which
give you insight on the inner state of SQL Server, Red Gate has a nice site on
them [http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com](http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-
gate.com)).

If it already exist is some form or platform please share.

------
rdl
An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially,
being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you
"own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself.

Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo)
against tampering short of powering them off.

(tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)

~~~
anonymousDan
Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have
you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What
level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to
just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've
been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly
be interested in mechanisms for preventing such issues ever happening?

~~~
natdempk
I have been wanting this for a while as well. Performance is not a huge issue
in this scenario for me, as security is the really the reason anyone would use
this. I would want to prevent data from leaking completely if possible. My
ideal scenario is that an adversary/host could take down my box, but they
couldn't get at the content inside without my authentication. I don't want my
instance to be clonable/rootable by the FBI, NSA, the hosting provider, or
anyone else. Ideally I should be able to set up a Tor host in this instance,
no one should be able to see inside under any condition, and I should have
some proof/verification that it is secure from outsiders as claimed. If they
realize that something undesirable is going on, I have no problem with the
instance being shut down, but I don't want my privacy/security compromised.

~~~
anonymousDan
So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with
TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable
adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how
you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic
encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there
are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out there that achieve
practicality by restricting what kind of operations you can perform on the
data).

~~~
natdempk
I guess, but it still seems like no one offers this and its not trivial. Do
you know of any research/systems/practical offerings in this area? This has
been something that I would be interested in learning a lot more about
honestly. I agree that bullet-proof guarantees are basically impossible and
that physical security is probably going to be the weak point at the end of
the day. Maybe some system could be created that made it hard to individually
tamper with one instance without alerting others, or made it hard to isolate
one from another from a hardware view? Do you think even something like SGX
can't prevent some level of physical threats? It seems like it would at least
make it harder/reduce the scenarios in which hardware is vulnerable, but I
haven't researched it extensively.

~~~
rdl
SGX is pretty reasonable IFF you believe in the Intel PKI.

I have been looking at how to do cheap ($20-50 slow USB connected (essentially
smartcard), $500-1000 PCIe) HSMs. If you do shared-computation with a host
(with or without SGX/TXT), you can get pretty decent performance with quite
modest HSM hardware.

Those provide NSA-type protection -- in that attacking a single instance isn't
guaranteed, and takes time, so a system with key rotation or k of n split
across locations is going to provide pretty reasonable security.

Private Core is definitely the most interesting TXT-based solution today; if
you built an IaaS provider with that tech plus live video monitoring, alarms,
etc., you could probably offer quite reasonable security assurances to people.
(i.e. the tools to defeat it require physical access, and if no one can gain
physical access to a rack once the rack is put into production...)

~~~
anonymousDan
The k of n split across multiple locations idea is interesting.

I agree that if you're paranoid about the NSA it probably doesn't make too
much sense to have faith in the Intel PKI. When you say pretty decent
performance for your HSM, do you mean less than 10 % for real world apps?

I'm currently assuming a threat model where an attacker doesn't have physical
access however, and looking more into how to use hardware to bootstrap a
minimal TCB that doesn't require OS or application rewrites but still gives
good performance. Even if only for specific use cases.

~~~
rdl
ARM or possibly Atom in a box, so pretty decent performance. The pain of the
HSM is the physical packaging, and my ultimate goal is to make that reusable
and let users select their own components and do their own final assembly and
certification.

------
mattmanser
Baby near me

Amenities near by with baby facilities, possibly with user ratings.

All of my recently baby-ied friends complain about finding places to go,
especially groups of recent mothers meeting up in the middle of the day.

~~~
avalaunch
As a (relatively) new dad, I would find this very useful. There doesn't seem
to be a central repository of such places and the ones in my city (Cincinnati)
are really badly organized, maintained, ect...

~~~
maxerickson
There is room in OpenStreetMap for this sort of data. Parks and playgrounds
are already frequently marked (along with stuff like museums), and there are
at least a few people trying to figure out things like changing tables.

I guess it would take a while before people were chasing details like kids
menus.

------
manuelflara
A place where developers can post their already launched projects, and
business/marketing/sales people can get in touch with them if they're
interested in becoming a cofounder . I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets
all excited about building and launching new stuff, but after that, I'm kind
of clueless about what to do, so I move on to the next.

~~~
nonsens3
Same problem here. Sideprojectors tries to solve this, but hasn't worked for
me so far.

[http://www.sideprojectors.com](http://www.sideprojectors.com)

~~~
manuelflara
Any particular ideas about what's wrong with it?

------
elchief
1\. License Tesla or Prius chassis/drive-trains and put Golden Oldie car
shells on top of them and sell them to retiring boomers (think Pink Cadillac).
Industrial Design IP of exteriors should be expired.

2\. A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and
natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps.

~~~
buss
> A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and
> natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps.

This, if done well, could be awesome. How you would effectively guarantee row-
level security?

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is a database whose rows are
only readable by the users that generated the data in those rows. Essentially,
the data in each row is encrypted with a key that's generated from the
password of the user.

Data breaches are bad because, among other reasons, nothing in the database is
encrypted. If each row was encrypted with a key only recoverable from a user's
password it would solve a lot of problems.

~~~
eurleif
How would you combine that with indexing? Seems like data needs to be
unencrypted to be indexed. And if you're not doing any indexing, isn't it as
simple as converting the user's data to JSON, and encrypting the JSON?

~~~
buss
Aye, there's the rub. Lots of nice features disappear when you're only storing
encrypted data. I suspect that it's not possible to create an index of the
data (before encrypting it) that doesn't leak information and thus ruin the
encryption (but IANACryptologist).

It would really only be useful for data you're not joining on or searching
over, and then you've got more of a dumb data store than a database.

~~~
eurleif
It might be useful if a database could enable encryption on specific columns
(which would make those columns unindexable).

------
wwwwwwwwww
A way for me to organize hundreds of gb of porn.

Seriously, porn organization is the 1 thing I haven't been able to master over
the years. A way to detect what your current preferences are and map them to a
video or image set would be revolutionary.

~~~
sparkie
A way to organize _anything at all_ would be a nice start. The real problem is
people trying to force arbitrary relationships into hierarchical models always
results in mediocre solutions. When are we going to start taking graph
databases seriously? (+ Graph filesystems)

~~~
mrlase
I'm really interested in this idea as I suffer from the same problem on my
local disk in addition to having years worth of documents across a DropBox
account, SkyDrive, and two Google Drive accounts.

What are your biggest gripes? What model would you like to see? A tag based
filesystem? Arbitrary graph?

Would love to talk to people such as yourself who have this problem.

~~~
sparkie
I'd like to see arbitrary graph based systems where there's no restriction on
the relationships you can create - although doing so takes more work than
dumping things into hierarchies. Tag based systems are useful for making the
transition to graphs, but they're really just "patching" graph-like semantics
onto trees - as are things like symbolic links in file systems.

Relationships are largely arbitrary, and what is meaningful to one person may
not be to another. In order to have an effective system, I think it would need
both a distributed and local component, such that there is this large,
distributed graph of knowledge of relationships, which you can download and
cache parts of selectively - and which you can add your own relationships to,
and chose which of those you wish to share. By collectively sharing
relationship, we can form consensus models which converge around specific
kinds of ontologies - which could be used to optimise storage and querying for
local caches of such boundaries.

My biggest gripe is perhaps this idea of bottom-up-schema creation, in which
we try to conjure up a model of relationships which may work based on our
limited knowledge of the models we want to express. Instead, the graph based
approach gives us a top-down-approach, where all the relationships are
visible, but where we focus on specific relationships to build an ontology,
then optimise our problem around it.

Filesystems in the traditional sense are far too limiting in that they already
push a bottom-up schema on you - that of files, and much of the data you want
to organize isn't files anyway. The filesystem is useful though, and necessary
to remain compatible with existing systems - but I think it should take the
top-down approach, where for example, you'd have some FUSE module which
accesses part of a larger graph database, and only cares about the file
specific relationships or ontologies.

I'm no expert on graph theory, and I've only played around with the ideas a
bit using existing graph databases (Titan, Orient, rel etc) and querying
languages like Gremlin and Datalog. I also have a few dozen databases I've
made with Postgres in order to map the relations I care about with refeences
to external information sources (e.g musicbrainz) - some of which are not
"open" in the sense that you'd want them in a distributed system, because they
require sign-ups to central services in order to manipulate them.

I've also looked at various attempts to build systems like this, but the
majority are proprietary systems, or centralized in some way or another, and
I've not discovered a sane way to locally cache the data I want without taking
whole copies of the databases.

At present there's just too much for me to learn and research, and not the
time or motivation to do it - partly because I feel it would need to be a
collaborative, free software project, as the profit motive is largely
incompatible with the need for a distributed system - and I'm too focused on
making a living right now.

~~~
mrlase
What's your email?

~~~
sparkie
my username @live.com

------
DanBC
"Pay for friendly email".

I would pay for faked friendly emails and messages. You'd need to price it low
enough to be sensible. There would have to be strict no sex rules; and
protection against scamming. I imagine it workin a bit like camming does now -
there's a "menu" of available people with mini biographies and the user picks
one and selects what kind of service they want (early morning motivational;
late night inquisitive; etc) and pays up front for X messages. The message
writer sends the messages and the site takes a cut of the payment.

This is a service, it is not an i troduction or dating or real friend site.

------
khebbie
Hey how about "problem monday" then. It is said that often times you should
not start with an idea, but rather with a problem. So maybe posting problems
could lead to great ideas...

~~~
RivieraKid
Many (most) good ideas don't solve problems but improve something, create new
way to have fun etc. For example, I wouldn't say that Minecraft solves a
problem (unless you define "problem" in a weird way).

------
adam419
A way to submit any legal document, and for a fee have it returned but
explained in plain english.

What do you guys think about this? And what do you think are the most common
use cases/legal documents?

~~~
lucb1e
I've actually been working on this. Dutch, unfortunately, but here you go:
[http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/en%20dan%20nu%20in%20het%20Nederland...](http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/en%20dan%20nu%20in%20het%20Nederlands.htm)

Quick translation of the text on the page:

Title: And now in plain Dutch

Intro paragraph: Contracts are always written in a very cryptic manner. So
what do they say in short, plain old Dutch?

Status of the project: beta. I've "translated" 2 out of 38 paragraphs from one
contract I've received, and that was a lot of work already. Those paragraphs
work fine now, but it still needs a lot more work.

~~~
adam419
Couple questions. Have you had any customers? What type of legal docs do you
think are best to target?

Are you trying to generate summaries programmatically?

~~~
lucb1e
> "Have you had any customers?"

No, no, it's nothing like that. It's just a small Javascript thingy that tries
to convert legal nonsense into sense. I got a contract in Dutch that I found
took way longer to read than it should (like, really read and understand all
implications), made this script and threw it online. It's in a directory with
dozens of unfinished scripts that I wrote.

So yes, summaries are generated programmatically. They have no legal value but
provide a much better read of what is written in the contract.

~~~
adam419
How does it translate any legal writing into a simpler form? That sounds like
a damn nearly impossible language processing feat.

~~~
lucb1e
Simple text replacement. I'm sorry if I just shattered the mental picture of
some high-tech language processing, but this pretty crude method that just
gets the job done :P

------
EwanG
Telepresence for travel. One use case is that I don't have time to travel to
location X, but would like to be part of a group who is hiking, etc there.
Could see this being quadcopters with cameras with dual controls (remote for
me and possible to be overridden by someone on site if there is an issue).

Second use case is my disabled daughter who I can bring back videos of places
to, but it's not quite the same as sharing the moment, and of course would
give her a sense of freedom to be able to zoom in and look at something I
might not have thought to capture.

Given connectivity issues to many of the places I know "I" would like to be
able to go to virtually, I suspect part of the problem will be convincing
folks that it doesn't ruin their wilderness experience to let other folks
attend virtually. Given that you would then have fewer travelers impacting the
environment I would consider this a net win.

~~~
prawn
I did wonder if anyone would watch real-time first-person hiking. Bit like the
slow TV movement. My brother has done a few hikes with a GoPro set to capture
a photo every few seconds and the results can be quite cool. With storage and
power, you could probably capture something. Streaming would be a lot harder
in even slightly remote areas.

------
yread
A device that sits in your toilet (under the water level) and detects trace
amounts of blood or other stuff that shouldn't be in urine or stool

~~~
mavdi
This is an excellent idea. Lot's of cancers can be prevented this way.

~~~
paulkaplan
Citation needed?

~~~
yread
I think mavdi really meant "diagnosed sooner". Or perhaps cancer _deaths_
could be prevented? Either way, just google "cancer blood in urine" or stool
and you get the idea.

~~~
mavdi
yes indeed, sorry I meant cancer deaths prevented

------
dalacv
Crowd meets Class Action Lawsuits. A mobile or web app that shows many class
action lawsuits in one place. I'd like to be able to go to one place and see a
large list of pending class action lawsuits and their corresponding meta-data
(deadline for joining lawsuit, company, details, link to website with more
details, etc)

~~~
nthomson
[http://www.classactionrebates.com/](http://www.classactionrebates.com/)

------
digisth
A real, smart browser bookmarking system. One that looks at your bookmarks,
and based on content (and/or other factors) categorizes _and_ organizes your
bookmarks for you without intervention. Due to issues around privacy, should
either run locally or be part of a large, anonymized data set if it needs to
use a SaaS. Even better would be a real standard for tagging URLs that
bookmarking system could just use on their own (kind of like CDDB music genres
or similar.)

------
rahilsondhi
A website for employees in a company to share SQL queries and their results,
like Heroku Dataclips. You can write your query in your browser, the results
will be shown, and you can just copy/paste the URL to a coworker for him/her
to see the results.

I'm already working on this, contact me if you're interested!

~~~
rokhayakebe
Rahil, have you thought about extending this idea to a place where you would
post a DB schema and SQL queries and let the community optimize it. Companies
will use this to tap into the expertise of many database engineers.

~~~
rahilsondhi
This sounds pretty out of scope for what I'm thinking of.

I'm trying to solve the problem of people sharing data within an organization.
I'm not trying to make a social community of database engineers.

Cool idea though! Feel free to contact me if you'd like to chat more.

------
gfodor
\- Browser plugin that lets you have private group conversations around other
peoples' posts. Pure evil, I won't do it due to pesky ethics. (Think "people
gossiping about how ugly someone is in their selfie behind their back" as
primary use case.) UX would be injecting thread inline on major sites, first
would obv be Facebook.

\- Better wedding planning software

\- Tool to go through LinkedIn "Who You Might Know" recommendations to assist
in job hunt

~~~
gopi
Your first idea was done before and FB shut it down
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-
comment-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-comment-
anonymously-on-techcrunch/) [http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-
threatens-to-sue-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-
sue-techcrunch-commenter/)

------
andrey-p
A wiki-style spoiler-free website for catching up with TV series/books.

For instance, you've only watched Game of Thrones up to series 2, episode 3.
You're about to start watching it again but can't remember what Daenerys was
getting up to.

You go to the Game of Thrones page on that website, pick your series and
episode, and choose "Daenerys" as a tag filter. It brings up all the major
plot points relating to her up to S2E3.

~~~
total
This does seem like a rather interesting idea.

However, how might one implement this while remaining concise? For example,
say a user tells the Wiki they are in S1E02; the Wiki would provide a synopsis
of the events relating to the specified tag up till that point in the series.
However, imagine a user tells the Wiki that they want the same specified tag
up until S3E10. That surely complicates things as far more major plot points
are likely to have occurred. How would this be handled? Would it just be what
the user at S1E02 was told plus everything after and up until S3E10 tacked on
to the end?

To further illustrate this idea, consider the following: User receives two (2)
plot points when selecting S1E02 User receives seven (7) plot points when
selecting S2E07 User receives (13) plot points when selecting S3E01 ...

It would be interesting if the synopsis provided could summarize dynamically
based on what point the user was caught up to in the given series. I've no
clue how that would be implemented, though, short of someone going in and
writing a response that would keep it concise for every episode that a user
could select.

(This isn't _my_ most concise comment on the internet. I'm sorry.)

~~~
andrey-p
That's pretty much what I was thinking, yeah. A detailed plot synopsis is
provided in chunks of information of 1-2 sentences. Each of them is tagged as
being at a certain point in the text/series, as well as extra tags about the
characters/settings that they deal with.

Each query that a user sends would just display a subset of the complete plot
synopsis. So user at S3E10 would see all the things that user at S1E02 will be
shown, and then the rest of seasons 1, 2 and 3.

The character/setting filtering is just a way of filtering down things
further. If you're just interested in what character A has been doing, you
don't need to pore through information about characters B, C and D.

------
zvanness
A search engine for knowledge and facts.

I think there's huge value in a search engine of knowledge and facts, where
all sources are verified. A search engine that is objective and contains no
opinions, crappy blogs or tweets, content farms. A search engine where you
can't game your rankings through SEO techniques or through higher add spend.

Google is amazing. Google Search is going to be here for a long time. I doubt
anyone will be able to come up with a solid replacement. But one of the
current problems with Google is that they have too much information.

So far, i've put together a tiny version of this concept, which i've found
very useful when i'm trying to learn new things or do some research. I would
love to see some smarter people turn it into something more.

~~~
raving-richard
It's been done. Wolfram Alpha[1] specifically.

Also look up "linked data" (I'm not sure if DDG uses linked data or not[2]).

[1]
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+speak+B...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+speak+Basque%3F)
[2]
[https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linked+data](https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linked+data)

edit: so "Hacker News" doesn't allow even basic HTML? Meh meh meh.

~~~
aaronem
> "Hacker News" doesn't allow even basic HTML?

I think that's to try to keep the focus on content rather than presentation,
and also because parsing user-submitted HTML to pick out the safe bits is a
pain in the neck. If you absolutely need presentation features you can't get
on HN, then turn your comment into a blog post or a webpage and link to it
from here. (But you probably don't need those features, and HN's formatter is
easy to get used to.)

------
jedberg
I like live shows. I would like a website that lists all the live shows in my
area. Like "show me all shows at Shoreline". I haven't found a single site
that tells me this.

~~~
tcpekin
I spend a significant amount of time looking up live shows, but what about the
Ticketmaster website for Shoreline doesn't do this? As far as I know,
everything at Shoreline has to go through Ticketmaster/Live Nation. If the
venue doesn't have their own calendar, most of the time Ticketmaster/Live
Nation does. My personal solution is just to go through all the venues
individually that I'm interested in. In the bay area that's about 15 spots for
me.

Are you looking for a "show me all shows in San Francisco"? I haven't found a
good solution to that either, and things like Eventful, Pollstar aren't the
greatest as they simply show too much.

[http://www.ticketmaster.com/Shoreline-Amphitheatre-
tickets-M...](http://www.ticketmaster.com/Shoreline-Amphitheatre-tickets-
Mountain-View/venue/229414)

~~~
jedberg
Yes, I should have said "Show me all events near San Francisco", because as
you aptly point out a single venue is easy to search. The problem is that I
have to find all the venues, do all the searches, and then do it again as they
add more shows!

So yeah, a single site, maybe one where I can upload my iTunes song list or
link to my Pandora or something so it can sort by why I like, would be
awesome.

~~~
dchuk
Seems you're looking for exactly this:
[http://www.bandsintown.com/home](http://www.bandsintown.com/home)

------
sferoze
I think 'Ask HN: Idea Sunday' is a great idea, I am definitely looking for a
project to work on and this is very helpful. Look forward to seeing this
continue.

------
benlm
examine.com meets google scholar

Place for all scientific studies to be elucidated with plain english
explanations, analysis, information on shortcomings, links to related studies,
open questions, links to further information. Would be community created
content, but needs some sort of community voting/moderation system to surface
the best content and empower the most knowledgable/trusted contributors.

Ideally this would be where you go when you see sensationalist headlines in
popular science magazines -- here you can find out what the study actually
means.

Anything like this out there?

~~~
juretriglav
I'm trying with [http://www.sciencegist.com](http://www.sciencegist.com)

The difficult part is getting contributions and building anything sustainable
around this idea. You can reach me at info@sciencegist.com if you want to
chat.

There's also [http://usefulscience.org/](http://usefulscience.org/) and
[http://sciworthy.com/](http://sciworthy.com/) but I think they both have
staff to write content.

------
jrvarela56
Im having trouble organising the information I consume. I have tried using a
mix of Google Bookmarks, Youtube's watch later, GDocs, Evernote, Pocket,
Dropbox (for pdfs/books) and tldr.io.

There has to be something that encompasses the full 'learning process': find
content, read/watch/listen it, summarise its most important points, list
actionables, revisit it in the future...

This maybe too personal to standardise, but even a 'convention over
configuration' approach would keep people like me from feeling stuck.

~~~
jamesisaac
This sounds like the problem I had, which I'm trying to solve with
[https://nachapp.com](https://nachapp.com) \- instead of my attention being
split between several apps which focus on specific TYPES of content (i.e.
everything you listed), it focuses on a specific WORKFLOW - acting as a
central high-level hub, based on the core concept of achieving personal goals
(which I think would be the same thing you mean with "learning process").

It isn't trying to completely replicate the storage of everything you have in
the apps you listed. Instead, it's trying to focus your attention to what your
real goals in life are, so you hopefully end up with quite a minimalist
approach, where you're discarding a lot of info that's essentially a
distraction, and really able to focus on only saving the stuff which is
relevant to your goals, and keeping a hierarchical list of actionables as your
method of recall for the content, instead of it being scattered randomly
across a dozen apps.

If this sounds like an attractive solution to you, would be great to talk
about this a bit more (you can reach me through the site's contact form),
because I want to work out ways to make the app smarter for covering that
exact workflow you're talking about (discovery -> actionables).

Note that the app may look pretty "simple" from the landing page, but it is
also very much aimed at power-users (I personally have a couple of hundred
active steps+goals).

------
bennesvig
A way to get notified of new book reviews for my book across Amazon, Audile,
iTunes, and GoodReads. Even better if it could also track sales from Amazon,
CreateSpace, and Audible in one place.

~~~
EwanG
You can sort of do this now (at least the sales) if you're willing to use
Draft2Digital and let them submit you to all those places. They get a cut of
each sale however, so you'd have to decide if the centralized reporting and
letting them do a bit of the leg work is worth the price.

------
eli
An ESP (email service provider) geared towards people publishing content
instead of marketers. Marketers are certainly the bigger & better market, but
they have hundreds of options to choose from. Almost no one targets
publishers.

(ping me if interested... I know more than anyone should about email)

~~~
slig
I think Tiny Letter <[https://tinyletter.com/>](https://tinyletter.com/>) does
what you want.

------
Mankhool
Create an RFID and/or NFC (Near Field Communication) READER that can mount on
a DSLR and dump read data into an IPTC field.

~~~
rch
I could imagine a variety of services to go along with modular, open hardware
for proximity communication. My impression is that this is a relatively
unaddressed market.

~~~
Mankhool
Yes it is. I'm a Media Asset Manager / Digital Archivist and there is no EASY
way to collect metadata about people (from their name tags for example, that
could hold name, company, title etc.) or environments.

~~~
wando
Can i talk more with you about this? You can email me at oeyr at uci dot edu

------
eli
An automated "backup" service for your website that crawls around and builds a
static copy of all the pages it can see. If the site goes does (or if you push
a maintenance mode button) it switches to the static site, maybe with a small
warning message. You'd probably need to run the DNS or integrate with DNS
services to make that easy to implement. The key is it needs to be stupidly
easy to set up.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)

~~~
liyanchang
Very similar, but not exactly: Cloudflare. Takes over your dns routes and will
detect when you are down and tries to continue serving.

~~~
eli
Yeah, they offer something similar (and in some ways better since it proxies
all the requests, it knows what files to save). But it's not quite what I
want.

Also there's a lot more you _could_ do. For example, versioning: show me what
the site looked like last thursday. For people using crappy or nonexistent
CMSes this could be huge.

------
shsteimer
A mobile app that combines flight info with airport food listings and reviews.
Let's you put in your flight numbers for a connection and will make
recommendations based on the time if your layover, gates you are flying into
and out of, etc.

~~~
Jonovono
I don't think it does exactly what you want but it somewhat useful: GatesGuru
(by tripadvisor). Can see a map of the airport and what they have to eat etc.

------
rkuykendall-com
Just for developers: Something that allowed you to change the IP your request
resolves to with a modified URL instead of editing the hosts file, like this:
127.0.0.1::[http://mysite.com/](http://mysite.com/)

Benefits: Not as much work, not as permanent, you can use multiple at once,
you can easily see where you are connecting.

I think this is something web developers would pay a few bucks for. I know I
would.

~~~
nacs
Localtunnel does this:
[http://progrium.com/localtunnel/](http://progrium.com/localtunnel/)

~~~
1_player
I had issues with localtunnel and I discovered ngrok:
[https://ngrok.com/](https://ngrok.com/)

Also you get HTTPS out-of-the-box and can introspect the data transmitted over
the tunnel.

------
salgernon
Waiforpaperback.com Informs you when alternatives printings are available
could monetize by showing similar titles in monthly summary emails

~~~
perlgeek
I've been thinking about a much more general idea recently: basically twitter,
but for data (in JSON format), not just text.

A company could simply announce all new publications, and you could subscribe
to that stream, filtering for paperback (and possibly authors you are
interested in).

Of course, there are hundreds of alternative use cases.

(Interested in doing the project with me? drop me an email
moritz@faui2k3.org).

~~~
RexM
I've had this sitting on my idea list for a couple of years. It almost seems
like this is what app.net is supposed to be. It also seems like this is how
applications would talk to each other with
[https://tent.io/](https://tent.io/)

------
epeterson19
Anyone been to an airport lately? All open outlets are swarmed upon by people
charging and keeping watch on their phones to make sure they don't get stolen.

How about mini lockers with miniusb and apple chargers in each locker. People
swipe a credit card and can rent a mini locker to charge their phone is.

I realize how low tech this is but it's less so than people babysitting
charging phones.

~~~
GBond
[http://gochargenow.com/locker.html](http://gochargenow.com/locker.html)

------
dgregd
Office package for Internet and open source era. MS Office concept was good in
1990. Google Docs just replaced local drive with cloud drive.

Tools for developers are really good. IDEs and DVCS are pleasure to work with.
But try to work on a spec, RfP, Offer, etc. with Word and Outlook. Online
wikis are quite good but it is not possible to send them via email to a third
party.

My idea for a text editor: * storage: wiki text files + embedded git repo *
save all to a single file, but with possibility to access and edit the
contents via web server / web app * possibility to squash all edits and send a
clean copy (branch) as an attachment * possibility to incorporate changes sent
back, thanks to DVCS * two edit modes: WYSIWYG and markdown style for experts
* two client modes: standalone with thick client (based on Webkit) and html5
client * possibility to access and modify the contents via APIs (Java, Ruby,
...) * optimized for screens, not for A4 / US letter pages

You get the idea. Corporations would love something like this.

------
duvok
A data driven and personalized alternative to credit scores.

Credit scores lack transparency, usability, and are often inaccurate
representation's of a person's financial health/responsibility. Especially
regarding student loans, credit scores are useless...all a 20 year old's
credit score tells you is how much his parents planned his financial life for
him

------
marmano
A voting system based on the Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System behind
Bitcoin. The major reasons votes couldn't be conducted electronically is
because of trust issues and today we have a technology that solves that. I
think this could potentially disrupt voting if properly executed.

~~~
jarofgreen
Can't really see a way of doing this without all votes being public, which is
sometimes wanted but often not?

~~~
mrfusion
Well you'd register to vote just like you do now, by mail or online, and get
returned a wallet instead of a little certificate.

You'd just need a law that the voting center can't track the wallets I guess.

------
paul7986
Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo system!

~~~
peterwwillis
Two issues: distribution and synchronization.

First off, you must either have all clients have a full copy of the song, or
have a remote site with the full song available for seeking-and-streaming. If
you stream it, you have to be able to seek to the position in the song that
everyone else is at so you can add more devices dynamically. You couldn't just
stream whatever your phone is listening to (e.g. pandora) because it would add
latency to the other clients' players and it would sound out of sync. The
exception is if your player actually cached the sound data coming out of
pandora, created a 10 second buffer, and started playing it "late", so the
other clients would have enough lead time to buffer the song and start playing
in sync.

Once you have resolved how to distribute the sound, you have to establish
synchronization with all the clients. Ways to do that:

* Ship an ntp client with the app. Downside: network latency, firewalls.

* Synchronize nearby players by playing a loud tone four times, allowing clients to sync to the tone. Downside: latency of speed of sound, can only do once (otherwise someone has to play tones in the middle of your song to sync a new client)

* Listen to a track already playing, analyze own song's structure, find that point in the song, start from there. Downside: must already have decent portion (or all of) the song to seek to the correct positions. (Possible solution: implementation of rolling checksum/deltas?)

* Child clients buffer the song data from the parent client. Assuming the parent has slept N time before playing, communicate with the parent to discover what point the parent is streaming from now, download its 10 second buffer, and start playing at the correct point once synced with parent. Downside: must do all of that (network establishment, sync with parent, download buffer, start play) within 10 seconds or the buffer will be out of sync. Possibly do a 60 second buffer?

If your remote host just has all the song data, you could also just record a
few seconds of whatever's playing around you, discover the song in your remote
host's database, sync to the sound you're hearing, and seek, stream and play
it. That would probably be the easiest thing, assuming your remote server had
whatever song was playing. Possible to index local songs too.

~~~
JonnieCache
It's much worse than that: if the soundwaves from all the different stereos
aren't at least roughly phase-aligned, it's going to sound pretty bad. When
working with installed soundsystems engineers typically apply sub-millisecond
delays on each channel. Touring setups don't always do this stuff, but they're
working with a few dozen speakers from the same manufacturer, not many
assorted stereos.

Still, it would be a lot of fun to try. Best to just use FM radio.

~~~
chaser7016
Looks like someone got this working using various smartphones
[http://vimeo.com/71647538](http://vimeo.com/71647538)

FM radios though just might sound better.

------
lukasm
Spotify released iOS SDK. Can someone make an app that will just have one
button? Just play the goddamn music. I think Spotify works on the wrong level
of abstraction. It should work exactly like a radio. Many people just want to
listen some good music for running, relaxing etc. They couldn't care less
about following artists and making playlists.

Also, I'd like to be able to play it while I'm on a train. Pre-fech 30min of
music to play when I'm underground and I have no internet connection.

If there is a hacker (London-based ideally) that want to work on that idea
give me a shout on lukasz.madon at gmail.

[https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-
sdk/](https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-sdk/)

~~~
grinich
Songza is pretty great for this.

[http://songza.com/](http://songza.com/)

iOS:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/songza/id453111583?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/songza/id453111583?mt=8)

~~~
lukasm
iOS app is US only and the website is broken. When I click on the play button
it redirects to the home page.

~~~
grinich
Working or me right now in Chrome...

------
Houshalter
An idea originally by sdrothrock which I've been thinking about for the past
few days: An app which can be trained to recognize certain sounds. You record
a few examples of that sound and then it listens and gives an alert when it
hears it.

Another idea, allow deaf people to "visualize" sounds. Just displaying the raw
sound wave is too redundant and difficult to interpret. But what if you could
display a higher level representation, perhaps obtained by unsupervised
learning.

Even cooler if you can attach _rough_ labels to the sound like is done by some
object recognition systems (example:
[http://i.imgur.com/anp7RY9.png](http://i.imgur.com/anp7RY9.png)).

The second idea is probably unrealistic but the first is possible.

------
DanBC
Something like a Yubikey but:

1) with a battery or supercapacitor or something, so it can have a proper real
time clock

2) with a much much better website. Yubikey needs to split the site into
Enterprise users, individual users, and developers. The documentation for
enterprise and individuals needs ro be much shorter and easier to understand.
The documentation for developers should be as good as possible, including
permissively licensed sample code in sensible languages.

I really hate the current password set up.

I want to carry my token with me and use that, and a passphrase, to unlock
everything. Log into my computer, decrypt the drive, open email, perform root
level actions, etc etc. i want it to work on my windows, linux, and max OSs.
Across browsers. Etc.

------
findwork
Considering this is Idea Sunday, would anybody be interested in validating my
idea?

It was originally posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519592)

The idea is simple:

+++Create an invite-only jobs mailing list similar to HN-standards+++

Companies want the best and talented workers wants to find the most rewarding
work, so why not keep the 2 well-maintained with the best firms and the best
workers?

If you're interested, read my thread above or simply go here and help me
validate the idea:

[https://www.surveymoz.com/s/109791NPJFT](https://www.surveymoz.com/s/109791NPJFT)

All feedback welcome and I will reply to anyone that has any feedback (good or
bad) on the idea.

------
larrydag
A peer-to-peer broadband solution to replace ISP dependence. Perhaps this
could be used on a small scale at first for hacker communities and then grow
from there. Challenges would be on interconnecting between p2p community
centers without relying on major ISPs. A hyrid approach might be needed at
first to establish connectivity.

Previous efforts:

Netsukuku - [http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-
alternative-p2p-wireless-i...](http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-
alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-network-the-netsukuku-idea/)

P2P Foundation Blog -
[http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/](http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/)

------
benjamincburns
Fair warning, I'm kind of a sarcastic person, and most of my ideas tend to
reflect that...

If you actually want to work on one of these, go for it! Just please let me
know as I'd like to hear about it (and if you'd like, maybe help out where I
can). Contact details in my profile page.

My three latest ideas with variations:

#1: Kitty cooker social game (please don't actually build this): Basically Cow
Clicker meets prisoner's dilemma. Everyone gets a cute little kitten. In order
to earn in-game currency (find a synonym for "cat poop" for a currency name,
please), you must cook your friends' kittens. Your friends cannot cook your
kitten if you have cooked theirs first. If all of your friends decide to
abstain from kitten cooking for the day - you either all get gold, or all of
your kitties get cooked anyway. In game currency can be used to buy cat
clothes, cooking paraphernalia, recipes, etc. Recipes are a tradable item,
effect earnings, might cost resources to use, and have a "cool down" period.
Variant: Puppy kicker.

#2: A toolbox of satirical marriage help apps. I really don't have a lot of
tool candidates, but they're easy to think up. For instance, "argument score
keeper."

#3: Rent-a-sheep (name taken, needs something else): Presale of wool from
individual New Zealand sheep. I live in New Zealand. There are lots of sheep
here. Imagine a site where the landing page is a paddock of little fluffy
sheep trotting around (SouthPark style animation, maybe?). When you click on a
sheep, up pops a bio showing a photo of an actual sheep, from an actual farm
in New Zealand. For a fee, you can "rent" this sheep, thereby receiving its
wool production from that year. In the mean time, you'll get little auto-
generated notifications about your sheep, perhaps including photos. You should
also be able to choose how the wool is processed. That is, scouring, dying,
spinning. All to be done in small batches.

Much easier variant: Small-batch customized supply chain for New Zealand yarn
sold to yarn stores in the USA (aka create your store's own brand of yarn).
Interface looks a bit like a slot machine - choose type of wool, then choose
scourer/washer, then choose either/both dying service and spinning service.

Both variants should be very "connection" focused. That is, if you're renting
a sheep, the site should do everything in its power to make you feel a
connection with that sheep. If you're a yarn store owner, you should know a
bit about the people who are performing each of the services, and you should
hopefully have a window into how they're processing your yarn.

~~~
tomcam
#3: Do farmers have the time or inclination to photo, name, and update the
status of individual sheep?

~~~
benjamincburns
You'd have to solve this for them. Short answer is, I think if you make it as
automated as possible, and I think if the margin from RAS is much better than
sales to wool buyers, they'd do it. Farmers here are very happy to include
technology so long as it comes with a simple-to-calculate ROI.

Edit: I don't think that this is mandatory or that it has to be super
frequent. Could substitute photos with cartoon images - but include a photo
from "shearing day." Could also find a way to automate the content of status
updates. Maybe have the sheep wear a logging GPS collar which is scanned once
a week or something (have to bake this into the pricing, of course)?

------
mrfusion
Put a drain at the top of toilets to prevent overflows (like sinks already
have)

~~~
jtregunna
And where exactly would it drain to? Your toilet's output is plugged, thus
causing the overflow, remember?

~~~
wpietri
A more practical approach might be a way to stop water from going into the
bowl. E.g., you lift up on the handle to close the tank flap. Or maybe there's
a stop button next to the flush button.

That would be almost as good as an overflow drain, but wouldn't require adding
second sewer pipe.

~~~
maxerickson
A solid linkage between the handle and flap is available.

(The toilet in the room a little ways from where I'm sitting has one)

------
crablar
"FootTraffic.com", a social network/foot traffic planning site.

The idea is that brick-and-mortar stores/restaurants/hairstylists/etc that are
located close to one another can communicate and coordinate days of the year
(or month) when everyone in the area who is participating offers some sort of
discount or sample.

It incentivizes consumers to make a day out of going to an area of town that
might not otherwise get a ton of business.

Could lead to an interesting community of people travel around the world
exploring and going to FootTraffic days.

------
svetha
Tracked changes for gmail. So instead of replying to an email in text and then
changing the color/font/size of words, tracked changes will do it for you
similar to how it does in Word.

------
bambax
A device that would let people sleep in public while letting other people
around them think they're awake (business meetings, boring lectures, etc.)

This could either be glasses with realistic eyes painted on them, or opaque
contact lenses (that would then require the bearer to be able to sleep with
their eyes opened -- but if no light enters the eye it should be quite
possible).

There are many situations when you can't really leave the room to take a nap
and yet you feel as though you'll die if you resist sleep a minute more.

~~~
awshepard
Someone just recently sent me a low-tech version of this -
[http://imgur.com/gallery/MekVijC](http://imgur.com/gallery/MekVijC)

------
dome82
An easy way for mole mapping at home and having an personal electronic journal
about it. It should be possible to share a link with your dermatologist
containing your mole mapping.

~~~
prawn
Mole checking over the net. I am never enthused about having to make an
appointment and strip down for a full check, but I'd pay a few bucks to get
one mole checked.

------
edvinmemet
Crowdbetting/Crowdtrading (etc)

A sports betting website that uses crowdsourcing to make the best bets. As a
user, you predict the outcome of some match, but your final bet isn't
necessarily what you chose, but what the crowd data indicates is the best bet.

Much like the CIA found crowdsourcing to be very effective in forecasting
global events
([http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-
you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent)), I think there's a good chance you
could successfully crowdsource things such as betting on sport results.

The way the CIA thing works, I assume (the article doesn't get into much
detail), is you have 3,000 people, you ask them to make some predictions, and
in the end you select the top 1%. When you compare the future predictions of
these top forecasters with those of CIA analysts, you find that the average
Joes tend to be more correct (even though they have less information than the
CIA analysts).

So you can do something similar with sports betting. You have a group of top
forecasters and their predictions for some game assume some probability
distribution (like, 30% bet on the home side, and so on). By comparing this
distribution with the average odds set by the major brokers, you can identify
where the odds have been set incorrectly (according to your crowd) and exploit
these weaknesses. For example, let's say that your crowd says that the odds of
the Away team winning should be 2:1, but the brokers set the odds at 4:1.
Then, this would be a good bet to place, assuming the crowd is 'more right'
than the brokers.

------
ghiculescu
I use Spotify for listening to music, it pushes data through to Last.fm, but I
suck at actually checking Last.fm for its (very good) new music
recommendations.

So take one of those recommendations from the Last.fm API and email it to me
each week. Add affiliate links (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) and take a little cut
each time I buy something I discover through this.

Better yet, if Last.fm just implemented this themselves I'd be so happy.

~~~
slazaro
There's a Last.fm app inside Spotify, maybe that would make it easier / more
likely for you to check it regularly.

------
callmeed
API documentation tool: If you have a REST(ish) API, the tool would allow you
to:

* Describe the authentication

* Enter all the objects, methods, URL endpoints, and parameters of your API

The tool would then:

* Generate pretty documentation, including example requests/responses

* Include a working web-based API console (like Mashery has)

* Auto-generates client libraries in Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Obj-C, etc. and keep them updated in GitHub

Bonus points for bootstrapping the API information from your Rails routes
file.

~~~
sunir
Like [http://apiary.io](http://apiary.io) ?

~~~
dabernathy89
Holy crap, that looks fantastic.

------
cweiss
A really _good_ iTunes/MP3 de-duper. Should have the following all in one
package: \- Talks to the iTunes library file (IE - doesn't just edit the
filesystem) \- Undo/non-destructive final delete. \- Smart/fast search that
reflects how iTunes handles duplicates. Should smartly leverage the following:
\- Filename compare: filename/filename-1/filename-2 \- Files with identical
sizes, then binary compare \- Metadata compare (title, album, time) \- Allow
auditioning of tracks \- Smart delete options - Select all lower bitrate
duplicates, select all filename-1, select all duplicates from path X. \-
Preserve/combine metadata from duplicates (IE - combine play counts, ratings,
copy tag if tag in target is missing, etc). \- Clean out missing items from
iTunes library. \- Vast amounts of idiot-proofing (list files/entries to be
changed, confirmation dialogs for any modifications, etc.)

I've yet to find an iTunes manager that has all of the above - Most fail at
the smart de-dupe search so when I get pages of results, I still have to audit
each entry.

------
cweiss
GetMeHome - A non-driving-centric nav system for the 2am crowd to safely get
home from a night out. Requirements:

\- UI geared for too-drunk-to-read - Big buttons, no text entry, large-type
text, low clutter images.

\- One button actions/options - "Go home", "Find open bathroom", "Find hotel",
"Prefer Train" "Cab OK"

\- EASY turn-by turn navigation for walking (large font street names with
"turn left in 2 blocks"). Always update auto-routing. Bonus points for
avoiding sketchy areas or using obvious landmarks ("Turn left at Bob's
Transmission Shop").

\- Location/time alerts for mass transit "Get off here" or "Wait here for
1:30am Blue Line Train to Hillsboro"

\- Alarms for "Time to leave the club for next train" \- Loud/big alarm for
"Leave now for last train!"

\- Since most phones seem to die around 2am, steps should be taken to be as
battery conservative as possible - Walking = less frequent server polling.
Also cache simple directions locally and turn off network features altogether
if battery life is super low.

(edited for readability)

------
glenstein
I would like to see something like PhotoSynth applied to video. PhotoSynth is
a program that infers three dimensional objects from two dimensional
photographs.

In particular I'd like to see this applied to public events, like sports. I'd
love to re-create, say, a music show or a live football game in 3D based on
livestream video coming from people's phones.

------
eli
Heroku add-on for hosted Varnish (the freakin' awesome reverse caching proxy).
You'd be able to speed up people's sites and potentially even save them money
by allowing them to run with fewer dynos. Ideally you'd be able to tweak the
config and view stats/graphs through a web interface.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)

------
meistro
A cheap hardwire device that I can take to the gym and not worry about
breaking it. There are lot's of great workout tracking apps but I won't risk
having my expensive smart phone smashed in order to record my workouts. I see
more people using pen and paper even with all the amazing apps out there.

~~~
gfodor
this is probably a core use case for smartwatches. i'd probably lift with a
smartwatch on.

------
mikejarema
I'd like a way to skim through videos. Playing at 2x or 4x doesn't really do
the trick.

For contrast, if I'm skimming through an article, I can quickly scan for
keywords, look for paragraph breaks & sentence breaks to get the gist of what
a particular section of the text is describing.

How can I skim a video the same way? I'm more interested in a solution for a
30 or 60 minute recorded lecture or conference keynote than something that
let's me skim a music video or blockbuster movie. So the solution here may be
more suited to one form of video than another.

[https://skimo.tv/](https://skimo.tv/) seems to be trying to hit the mark, but
from what I've seen, they've got a long way to go. And I'm not 100% sure that
pulling a few short video segments out of a long video is the solution.

~~~
Spittie
One possible way I could think is to have the video and the transcript side by
side. Then you could skim around the transcript, and clicking on a phrase
should bring you to that point in the video.

------
olalonde
A package/dependency manager for C/C++. In my limited experience working with
C/C++ projects, the most painful part was always getting the project to
actually build (downloading all dependencies, figuring out how the Makefile
works, etc.). In other words, a npm/brew for C/C++.

~~~
milani
For anyone who wants to see how it can be built: CocoaPods does it for xcode
and objc.

------
billen
There is an easy platform for this.

[http://ideas.ozonebit.com/](http://ideas.ozonebit.com/)

Check it out!

~~~
avalaunch
I was hoping this would be a better platform with more relevant features than
HN for browsing/submitting ideas, but it actually has less features.
Commenting, I think, is a must have feature. Being able to tag and search by
tags would be nice as well.

------
miguelrochefort
A single interface/application that can be used to do anything. An actual
implementation of [http://zombo.com](http://zombo.com).

I don't want an account on 1000 different sites, nor do I want 100 apps on my
smartphone.

It can be done. Just not through incremental changes.

------
sakunthala
A more accessible desktop client program for "Bitcoin IPOs". Useful for
crowdfunding. Kind of like this but less messy:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133147.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133147.0)

------
systematical
I had an idea for a "plug and play" tor relay. This would be suitable for
computer literate folks who are committed to privacy and such, but not
necessarily up to installing linux and tor. Trick would likely be keeping this
to around $50 or less. Thoughts?

~~~
gelstudios
One such appliance/distro is the "Personal Onion Router To Assure Liberty",
there's even a raspberry pi version:
[https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi](https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi)

------
josephjrobison
Uber for delivery via drones. Kind of reaching, and I know it's not practical
yet, but the general concept is cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Uber did it
themselves first since they have a knack for trying weird delivery stuff like
ice cream or flowers or whatever.

You would open your Uberish app, punch in the weight of what you need
delivered and where to deliver it to, it would give you an estimate, and come
to your house to pick it up and make the delivery. Really not that far off, I
believe the FAA has or is relaxing the rules on commercial drone flight below
400ft and the Parrot drones are capable of following waypoints on their own to
a destination, and coming right back home when they're done.

~~~
lukeholder
so
[http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011](http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011)
?

~~~
josephjrobison
I was thinking more of sending stuff peer to peer than purchasing something
from Amazon! Or a system to help small businesses to do so.

------
josephjrobison
A matchmaking service for business owners to digital marketing and/or web
development companies.

A business owner is not going to know everything that the digital company is
explaining to them or selling to them, and since there's no large digital
companies that are the gold standard, but just a very fractured industry, it's
hard for them to really know what they're getting.

The matchmaking company would advocate for the business owner. The matchmaking
company would really understand the web development and digital marketing
landscape, but they are not selling the services themselves. They would ask
the potential agencies the really hard questions that the business owners
wouldn't know to ask on their own.

------
jansanchez
Netflix for Sports. But not quite the same. There wouldn't be just 1
subscription were you get all. You would be able to pay per game and as well a
pass for all games of a certain team. You would be able to watch any games
live or any other time of your convenience. It would be cool also to have just
'a show main highlights of the game'.

Prices per game should be relatively cheap, like 1.99 or 2.99; except some
cases like championship finals.

I would try first to secure the rights to show some of the European soccer
leagues and championships as they should be easier to get than any of the main
American leagues. Hopefully none of the US networks have an exclusivity
agreement.

~~~
jon-wood
> I would try first to secure the rights to show some of the European soccer
> leagues and championships as they should be easier to get than any of the
> main American leagues.

Maybe the Lithuanian 3rd Division. European soccer leagues cost a fortune to
get rights for:

UK Premiership: £1.78bn [1] UK Third Division: £88mn [2]

Annoyingly I couldn't find actual costs on much else, but my point is that
European soccer is _huge_ , and you won't pick up the rights cheaply.

[1] [http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/fans/faqs/how-much-
clubs-...](http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/fans/faqs/how-much-clubs-
receive-broadcast-money.html) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_League_Championship#Br...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_League_Championship#Broadcasting_rights)

~~~
jansanchez
While the Premier League rights seem to be quite expensive, I wouldn't go to
the Lithuanian 3rd Division :) Bundesliga seems much more approachable [1].
Rights costs are €70 million in the current cycle, and close to €150 million
in the next. I am sure that the portuguese and italian leagues would also be
more affordable. It would be quite interesting to know costs for La Liga
(Spanish). One may also be able to approach the rights owner with some more
interesting ideas, like instead of paying all upfront, they will get a high %
per user that purchased a match. Not sure how would that go.

Anyway this is just an idea, and it would take someone with good financial
resources to undertake this project.

[1]
[http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/bundesliga_to_double_inte...](http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/bundesliga_to_double_international_rights_fees_with_fox_deal/)

------
zarify
Manual route planning for walkers/runners/cyclers.

My idea was that there are lots of fitness style apps that track where you've
gone, how fast and so on, but I haven't seen anything that lets you plan your
route out beforehand, see how long it'll be and then estimate how long it will
take. I was thinking drawing a simple overlay on a map interface. I recently
got back into walking/running and wanted to slowly ramp up what I did, but
wanted a route I could get all the way through (not run until I can't, then
have to still get back) so wanted to plan ahead, and also allow for cuts
through parks, bush trails and so on.

~~~
graup
Also, add elevation information. Especially for cycling, would be great to see
how a slightly longer route compares to a shorter one with bigger ascents.

Wrote this, googled it and actually found something fairly useful:
[http://www.doogal.co.uk/RouteElevation.php](http://www.doogal.co.uk/RouteElevation.php)

~~~
zarify
I figured there'd be some traditional route planning already done. The problem
with a lot of this is it's looking for the most efficient route, rather than
the route someone actually wants (eg if I want to do a circuit from my house).

Agreed that elevation is a good thing too though.

------
phantom_oracle
Something to keep in mind whilst sharing your idea:

Your idea may be great and may appeal to a science/tech community on HN, but
be wary of building something where the audience is very small (if you plan on
commercializing it).

Although quite a few of the ideas have some "mass appeal", some of them also
seem so narrow that you'd be better off building them as OSS projects and
releasing them into the wild (as they'd never achieve huge commercial
success).

Just for the sake of guidance, plan on what you will do with any ideas you
follow through with (go commercial or open-source it).

------
EwanG
One more pain point I'd like to solve. Something that can process my pictures,
and tell me what wildflower(s) are in them. Sitting down with a guidebook is
tedious, and sometimes it's hard to tell which version from a book or site is
closer to the picture you have because of the angle. So I end up adding meta
data that it's a picture with blue flowers. Not to mention that there are some
longer term ecological studies that could be done if I can see how often
flowers or plants turned up in a certain area 10 years ago compared to now...

------
gorax
\- Movie Quote Search \- Search for a movie quote and it brings up the part of
the movie where the quote starts. User can then adjust the length of the clip
they wish to share. No longer than 30 seconds.

\- Mobile App - Timed Deals for local businesses. Company registers their deal
and how many they wish to offer. A potential customer who follows certain
types of products may get the promotion, The catch is, Promotion only last 30
seconds(max) and you have to buy it right then.

Anyone wants to help me with any of these I'd love the help.

~~~
Jonovono
I am trying to make something similar to the Movie quote search. I am focusing
more on making an easy way to share your favourite clips from shows.

I made a tool to do selection screen recordings that record the system audio.
Makes it really easy to record clips from youtube/netflix etc:
[https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter](https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter)

I am working on a simple website to host the clips as well. cuts.io (live
again soon). I want that as a hassle free alternative to youtube, for short
clips!

~~~
Jonovono
Update. Not sure why it's not letting me edit the post?

The site is running now. Here is an example of a clip I made with the tool
from Netflix. All the clips on the site feature Ted Mosby.

Example: [http://cuts.io/c/gJl6x_L2o](http://cuts.io/c/gJl6x_L2o)

------
DanielBMarkham
I don't know if this already exists or not, but I'd like an app for iOs/droid
that shows all of my installed apps and what permissions they need -- in a
comparison/grid format. It's easy to agree to all kinds of stupid permissions
when you're first looking at an app, but later on, having dogFood 3.0 phone
home all the time when it's never used is not-so-good. I'd like to go back
periodically and look at all of my apps, at one time, from a permissions
standpoint.

------
Jemaclus
* Hearing aids that can run off body heat. Not even sure if this is possible, but I've heard of watches that can recharge their batteries from body heat. You know how expensive and annoying it is to buy batteries for a hearing aid?

* A better credit report system than Experian/TransUnion/etc. The current system is flawed on a number of levels -- not the least being that someone can file a claim against you and you have very little recourse. Something with a little more accountability and a little less emphasis on distant history. For instance, if two years ago I lost my job and fell behind on bills, but now I've had a steady job for a year and have been paying down my debt, that shouldn't rule me out for buying a car or a house. In other words, just because I might have been financially unstable in the past does not mean I'm financially unstable now.

* a HUD for subtitles/closed captioning on TVs, so hearing people don't have to see subtitles while deaf/hard of hearing people can see them. This would be especially awesome in movie theaters.

* A Fitbit clone that actually figures out what I'm doing, rather than just counting steps. (For example, it knows my height/weight/gender, and it knows that I took X steps in Y minutes, so it should be able to calculate Z pace and conclude that I'm running.)

* Something that makes tracking caloric consumption EASY. For instance, I'm at a friend's house and we have some mac 'n cheese. I open up my LoseIt app, and I see several options: Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, Velveeta Mac 'n Cheese, KFC Mac 'n Cheese. Well, you know, we made this mac 'n cheese from scratch. Which one of these is the most analogous to what I just ate? At this point, I'm just guessing, right? So make an app that makes those guesses for me. "What'd you eat today, Jemaclus? On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being super healthy, how healthy do you consider what you just ate?" Then check out all the values for macaroni and cheese, identify the options that most closely match the health scale I gave, run some calculations, and come back with an estimate on what I ate. If at the end of the day you say "You ate somewhere between 1900 and 2150 calories today," that's better than saying "You ate exactly 1937 calories today," when honestly, I was just guessing about those portions to begin with.

------
mrfusion
Use ultrasound to measure shoe size and also see how we'll shoes fit. Sell to
shoe stores.

(I heard they used to do this with X-rays before people knew better. )

------
lukencode
A screencast app (or browser extension) specifically to create those short
gifs showing product interactions that have been showing up recently.

~~~
Jonovono
I making something sort of like this for Mac. It's for recording a selection
of your screen with the system audio. I have not made it so it can convert to
Gif or WebM, but that is in the plans!

[https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter](https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter).

------
dopplesoldner
A sentiment search engine. Suppose you type the name of a restaurant or a
camera or a protein supplement - you get condensed view of "sentiments" with
scores in different categories. Data is scraped from individual reviews,
shopping sites etc. Additionally you get information about the original source
of information so you can carry further research if you want to.

------
artur_makly
Back when we were in an accelerator, I was blown away by how many tools were
being used by the other startups ( over 300 teams ) that i've never heard of.

So i came up with [http://Vettted.com](http://Vettted.com) as a way to harness
that data..and ideally create conversations about how each team used each tool
specifically.( that part still needs work )

Any takers?

------
pixelcort
Smartphone Email Client with Chat UX

For Mac, [http://www.uniboxapp.com/](http://www.uniboxapp.com/) comes close,
but basically an a app for my phone for Email, grouped by sender, sorted by
last message received per sender.

Most personal email nowadays are one-liners, so this UX would work well for
them.

Expanding, senders could be organized into groups, etc.

------
bboston7
I wish there was an easier way to peal oranges

~~~
Mz
If you don't know, these are awesome:
[http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=peel+oranges+tool&FORM=H...](http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=peel+oranges+tool&FORM=HDRSC2#view=detail&id=DAD537B240CBD030342BF526F052366580CFFE40&selectedIndex=4)

Also: There is a musical joke in there somewhere (but I am not musical).

(Not intended to harsh on you. I just find the typo funny. Carry on.)

~~~
bboston7
Whoops! Thanks for the link though, I may have to pick one of those up.

------
frankus
A "Movies I've been meaning to watch" queue. Sort of like Netflix's queue, but
not limited to a particular provider's catalog. For each movie, show the
cheapest (legal) way to stream/rent/buy it. Add price drop alerts. Monetize
through commissions and/or ads.

~~~
taitems
[http://goodfil.ms](http://goodfil.ms) does a pretty good job of this.

------
mzemel
A website that lets you watch the second episode of many television shows. The
pilot episode, I feel, is usually not indicative of the direction/feeling of
the show, or is concerned with setting up the backstory, whereas the second
episode sets the direction for where the show is going.

~~~
jansanchez
Couldn't you already do this with Netflix or Hulu? Just start with the 2nd
episode?

~~~
kzisme
Yeah you can just select the second, or whatever episode you want to watch.
I'm not seeing the point of this.

------
postsantum
A notepad that can send my handwritten notes to the cloud. It should have a
mini-scaner embedded into the top cover so when I want to backup a note, I
just close the notepad, push the cover, remove the first page, close, push
again.

None of these ipad apps can substitute the good old pencil drawings

~~~
melloclello
Why not just photograph your notepad with your smartphone?

~~~
gfodor
the point seems to be to have your handwritten notes uploaded automatically.
that's the product.

~~~
melloclello
meh @ that 'product'

------
sage_joch
A service that facilitates company matching of employee donations to non-
political charities. Ideally, the service should make it as effortless as
possible for all participants: employee, company, charity. This could be
generalized into a kind of philanthropic social network.

~~~
kareemm
www.chimp.net does this in Canada (been a client of mine for several years and
counting).

------
zgm
There was a discussion on an earlier thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401))
about bringing App Stores to servers. Would people use and/or pay for
something like this?

~~~
msteinert
Bitnami [1] does something like this. I've used their Gitlab installer and
virtual appliance with success.

[1]: [https://bitnami.com/](https://bitnami.com/)

------
cglee
odesk for physical low/no skill physical labor. Some things just require
muscle: moving, yardwork, lifting large furniture, etc. Would be nice to be
able to see who's near you and hirable on an hourly basis. Bonus points for
verified background checks, etc.

~~~
lixon
[http://www.taskrabbit.com/](http://www.taskrabbit.com/)

~~~
cglee
I've used taskrabbit and it's very close to the idea I mentioned, though what
I had in mind is more pure physical labor related. The premise of the idea is
to remove middlemen like moving companies, landscaping contractors, etc who do
nothing more than organize laborers.

~~~
lawncheer
Hey, I am putting the finishing touches on lawncheer.com, will be launching in
a couple weeks, hope to meet the mowing/landscaping need.

------
dalacv
Homework Tutor App - App that allows kids to take a picture of a homework
problem and submit a question about it. Then the picture and question get
submitted over to MTurk. 3-5 answers come back within minutes from folks on
MTurk.

~~~
petersouth
you try the Yahoo answers homework helper? The questions in the algebra &
geometry math section were getting answered within a couple mins. I'd have to
race to answer them or someone would get them before me. Were you thinking
primary school stuff or college?

------
mavdi
Do this for me and I will subscribe.

I will send a box full of my letters in month to you, you scan them and make
them searchable online for me and send the box back with a label.

Later when I need something, I can search online and know which box it is in.

------
sparkie
A social network where the _users_ get paid for the advertising they do.

~~~
Jonovono
Can you expand on what you mean by this?

~~~
sparkie
I mean, we're practically all advertisers in some way or another - every time
we share a promotion with our friends, or even just discuss a new product
we're interested in. Most of the time we're not advertising for the sake of
profit, but just sharing interests with like-minded people.

Social media outlets attempt to tap into our general ignorance of advertising
profitability - and they act as the middle-man between companies wishing to
advertise, and the people who're sharing with friends - but facebook take all
of the profit by inserting themselves between these relationships, and the
users who are sharing don't notice they done a large part of the advertising
work, for free.

Facebook can obviously provide some usefulness, because it knows where you
are, what your interests are, and your recent activities - so it can target
you for specific promotions. A recent video by Vertitasium[1] showed how this
isn't without problems though, and does not directly correspond to ROI for
advertisers. (Likewise with many advertising models, there's always people
trying to game them to earn a quick buck). Facebook provide the "advertising
seed", by predicting who is likely to share.

I see a different potential model that could arise with the gaining popularity
of cryptocurrencies and electronic transactions though - one where advertisers
only pay when it results in a direct ROI, by tracing electronic signatures
through a public, distributed ledger.

If a company wants to promote a product, and they offer a $10 advertising
bounty for every advertisement which results in a direct sale. They initially
create two digital signatures using "cryptocurrency X" and pass them to
advertising agencies A and B. A advertises the product with "Get $5 back off
your purchase when you register your product using X", in which they make this
guarantee by creating a transaction whereby the original input transaction
from the company is used as the input, and the output is split in half between
the buyer and A. When the buyer then registers their product with the
advertising company, they release the $10 into the public ledger, which
propagates $5 to A, and $5 back to the buyer. B is greedy and wants all of the
$10 for themselves, but fails to make any direct sale, and thus, is not paid
anything.

In this way, there can be any number of middle-men between the company and the
buyer, and each party can agree on the fees they wish to have for each direct
sale that results. By having a public ledger of who is making the sales,
companies and advertisers alike can use analytics to discover the best routes
to sales, and narrow down their advertising strategies, and agree on the most
reasonable fees for each of the parties involved.

The social media aspect is to have this technology encoded into the social
platform, such that it is mostly invisible to users - they simply "promote" an
existing post which has a bounty attached to it, and if those re-posts
eventually result in direct sales, their wallet starts to grow. The part where
users need to actively know about the system is when they purchase and
register their purchase, such as to trigger the release of the advertising
fees through the chain in the public ledger.

These are only rough ideas and I have no idea how they'd be implemented
effectively, including issues around anonymity and ensuring the system cannot
be gamed by registering a product then returning it, for example, but I think
there's infinite potential for such ideas to replace the advertising empires -
so that literally anyone can become a paid-advertiser, and where ones
effectiveness as an advertiser results in profit. This wouldn't make facebook
et al obsolete, only distribute the profit a bit more - and it would help to
improve the AI which is behind FB's advertising, as it would be inefficient to
promote things which aren't likely to result in direct sales. Everyone wins,
although facebook's profits may decline a bit.

[1]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag),
also
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g)

------
dalacv
A video game that looks like this: [http://www.jonasginter.de/360-grad-video-
mit-6-gopro-kameras...](http://www.jonasginter.de/360-grad-video-mit-6-gopro-
kameras/)

------
joshmn
A demo mode for browsers.

Incognito / private mode kind of solves this, but form autocompletes, and
browser history when I enter a URL doesn't always contain stuff I want to show
in front of my clients.

~~~
timdorr
If you're using Chrome (and I believe Firefox can do this too), if you go to
the settings, there is a section for Users. You can add a new user to the
browser and use that account for demo purposes. Our sales guys do the exact
same thing.

~~~
flusensieb
You can use Firefox Profile Manager and create a new profile for demonstration
purposes. ($ firefox -ProfileManager)

------
adamzerner
TaskRabbit for businesses

~~~
sunir
Intriguing. I have some immediate questions.

What is wrong with using taskrabbit itself? What tasks do you envision? What
about virtual assistants like Zirtual.com?

~~~
coolsunglasses
TaskRabbit is a pain in the fucking arse to get something done.

I don't want to negotiate, I want a quote and a yes/no decision on the quote.
That's it. Period. End of story.

\--- has tried to use TaskRabbit on _three_ different occasions to get
something done, all failed, two were to get lunch for an office. (so,
business)

Never using TaskRabbit again.

------
andrewcooke
a simple, motion-sensitive sleep alarm. i just tried to find one, but they all
require a phone or tablet. they're nothing simple and stand-alone with a very
basic interface.

~~~
aaronem
What is a "motion-sensitive sleep alarm"? One of those widgets that wakes you
up at the most advantageous part of your sleep cycle that falls within a given
bracket of time? ISTR seeing one of those a while back, in production, which
was built on the wristwatch form factor and didn't need to integrate with an
external device; if indeed that's what you're looking for, I'll see if I can
turn it up and post info about it here.

~~~
andrewcooke
yeah, one of those (thanks). edit - knowing it was a watch i've found this -
[http://www.sleeptracker.com/](http://www.sleeptracker.com/) but if you have
something simpler / less expensive / more attractive to my partner (less nerdy
looking) i'd be interested. edi2 - ah, also
[http://www.axbo.com/pages/shop](http://www.axbo.com/pages/shop)

so i guess to correct my original post - something more like a simple,
traditional alarm clock. with less obvious tech. but that somehow works this
same way. basically just a clock display and some buttons to set the alarm
time, and i guess some kind of wearable sensor.

~~~
aaronem
The Zeo Sleep Manager Pro [1] looks like probably your best bet.
Unfortunately, Zeo closed its doors about a year ago, which may make it
difficult both to find the product available for purchase in the first place,
and to get support for it once purchased. That said, phone integration appears
to be otherwise ubiquitous in the field, at least judging from the few minutes
I've spent poking around Google and Amazon; that being the case, your choices
may well reduce to either accepting phone integration and making the best of
it, or finding a way to get your hands on an orphaned product and making the
best of _that_.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-
Manager/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-
Manager/dp/B002IY65V4)

------
samelawrence
I will slowly update this over time:

[https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas](https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas)

------
plaxis
Search function for browser tabs. So hard to find pandora in the haystack, and
I need a short cut to search through all the interesting things.

~~~
ivank
In Firefox, type "% query" into the URL bar. That will search just open tab
titles and URLs.

    
    
      Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
      Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
      Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
      Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
      Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed.
      Add # to search for matches in page titles.
      Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs). 
    

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-
your-b...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-
bookmarks-history-and-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly)

------
rgbrgb
stop-the-data-orgy.com: A service that makes it easy (2 clicks) to migrate my
email storage from gmail/googleapps to to s3/dropbox.

~~~
icebraining
CloudHQ (not affiliated, never used it) makes it seem pretty easy[1]. Not two
clicks, but that's mostly due to authentication.

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/cloudHQ/backup-gmail-to-
dropbox](http://www.slideshare.net/cloudHQ/backup-gmail-to-dropbox)

~~~
rgbrgb
Thanks but that just does backup. I have a domain I use with google apps. I'd
like to move that to a non-ad-driven email server that doesn't mine/sell my
data and preferably that I can own.

------
asselinpaul
Two for today:

-a site to upload Evernote notebooks to share/view online.

-a service that saves all your snapchat stories on the cloud

------
nroets
An app that shows me where my friends and family are.

(Like Google Latitude used to do)

~~~
yellowbkpk
This functionality was moved to the Google Plus app. At least on Android, you
can fire up the Google+ app and go to "Locations". Invite people to see your
location and ask them to let you view their location, etc.

------
antr
A Dribbble for video creators/animators.

~~~
gregbarbosa
Doesn't Vimeo do pretty damn well with this? Or are you looking more for
snippets of animation/shots, instead of Vimeo's YouTube length videos?

~~~
antr
Vimeo is Youtube for great, quality video productions. I'm looking more for
snippets and/or past work.

The reason I say this is because in the past week I started looking for video
animators/designers (I don't even know what the right name is) who can
design/create a 5-10 sec intro + ending animations/videos, and Google isn't
the best option. I'd love to browse through dozens of snippets a la Dribbble
in order to contact those companies/freelancers I find their work appealing.

------
lixon
a service for creating simple wedding invitation pages with a unique URL. no
ads or sponsored links

------
afshinmeh
I'm in!

------
Eleutheria
Open University.

A massive repository of all books needed for any career.

No teachers, no videos, no homework, nothing, just the books, free, forever.

~~~
karangoeluw
[http://www.gutenberg.org/](http://www.gutenberg.org/)?

~~~
Eleutheria
Nop. Not a single Law School, Medicine, Computer Science, Civil engineer book
in that listing.

It should be organized like an university with all the programs by semester
and their respective books.

Btw, I don't care about diplomas, I care about knowledge.

------
SuperChihuahua
All shaving machines are crap. I also need to stop biting my nails.

------
rsa
awesome idea!

