
Ask HN: Idea Sunday - _hoa8
Continuing the series! Go...<p>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.
======
miguelrochefort
Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor
sticked with us for that long.

I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is
with a diagram.

[http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak...](http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancake-
recipe-crop.jpg)

You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to
blanch vegetables.

Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need butter by the
steps to make it.

Allergic to peanut? These nuts are a good alternative.

Let's build a semantic recipe platform that's not linear and add a functional
twist to ingredients (the part where you can substitute an ingredient by the
function that returns one).

~~~
mikeblum
I'm on a side project right now that involves indexing recipes by ingredients
and the like, making an api could make the jump to substitutions and other
meta-like mods.

~~~
xerophtye
Have you tried [http://foodpair.com/](http://foodpair.com/) ?? it scrapes
recipes from different sites and indexes them ingredient and lets you search
recipes by just telling it what ingredients you have. You can also click each
ingredient in a recipe to find out general substitutions for it (not recipe-
specific).

------
avalaunch
A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss
having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to
manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home.

There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors
needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist,
angieslist, or google for contractors that service your area. Then you play
phone tag with each. Then you schedule a time for each to come out and give an
estimate, which can be a major interruption to your week. Then you schedule a
time for the chosen contractor to actually complete the work. And then you
cross your fingers that you chose well, because if you didn't, you'll have an
even bigger headache on your hands.

Ideally I would pay a large monthly fee (500-1k) and absolutely everything
would be covered. Regular maintenance would simply get done without requiring
anything of me. My lawn would get cut when it needs it. My driveway would be
cleared when it snows. My gutters would be cleaned as needed. My home would be
cleaned twice a month. And so on. When ever anything else needs fixing, I'd
have a single point of contact (an app, maybe) where I could open a ticket.
I'd then be offered a selection of times when an expert could come fix the
issue and after selecting a time that works for me, an expert would actually
show up at that time and fix the problem. A little more friction could be
removed if I could preselect times when it's acceptable for maintenance
personnel to enter my home. Ideally I wouldn't even have to be home. The
service would also have permission to deal with my insurance company as needed
since that's also a major pain point. They'd cover anything not covered by the
insurance. Or perhaps I could do away with my existing home insurance in favor
of this full service home insurance company.

To begin the service, someone would have to perform a full home inspection to
uncover preexisting issues which wouldn't be covered. The service could help
take care of those issues but it'd have to be on an a la carte basis. Once the
home was up to snuff, then the monthly fee would kick in and cover any new
issues, as well as regular maintenance.

A simpler version of the idea, which wouldn't be as good but would have a lot
less risk would be to offer maintenance only: lawn cutting, regular cleanings,
ect... I'd still pay good money for that.

~~~
busterarm
Property management companies take care of this for rental units.

Why not just find a good one that operates in your area and pitch the idea to
them? Normally they operate for a percentage of rents but I'm sure you could
find one who would do it for flat rate.

Your problem with the insurance company thing is you might have to give them
Power of Attorney (which you really don't want to do) to make insurance claims
on your behalf.

The Property Management company would already have the liability insurance
that any company working in this space would need to do this for you.

~~~
avalaunch
For some reason I cannot edit my comment so I'll reply again.

I've been researching property management companies in Cincinnati (where I
live) and I've come to a few conclusions:

1\. There are no good property management companies in Cincinnati. At least,
there are no highly reviewed property management companies - only those with
negative reviews or no reviews at all.

2\. Owners looking to rent their homes might be a great demographic for this
idea. While most of the property management companies state that they do
regular maintenance checkups, they really aren't incentivized to do so and
from the reviews I read they typically don't. They're really only incentivized
to keep the renter renting so that they continue to get their cut. As it
stands, owners and tenants are often at odds when it comes to "needed" repairs
because the property management companies charge the owners $50/hour plus
parts for any repairs beyond the most routine of maintenance. Basically the
property management companies have stuck themselves between a rock and a hard
place where it's almost impossible to make both the owner and tenant happy.
If, however, the owners were paying a larger monthly fee that covered all
repairs, they'd no longer be at odds with the tenant. Of course, the problem
of "tenant abuse" would then fall on us. Hopefully by being proactive with
regular maintenance the abuse could be mitigated somewhat.

I'm going to call a few property management companies tomorrow to get a better
idea of what exactly is and isn't covered under their plans.

~~~
busterarm
Seeing as though I live in Hilton Head, I'm probably in the ideal market to
try a scheme like this (#2).

There are a ton of remote homeowners renting out their property here without
using a property manager or without using a good one. Unfortunately the
homeowners I mention here tend to be extremely greedy people and don't have
property managers because they don't want to pay anyone. They do things like
advertise their units have cable TV and free wifi and have the cheapest, worst
tier of service and constantly call the cable provider every month trying to
get credits for fictional outages.

There's probably some money to be made here but I'm not sure I'd want to be
the cog that keeps their greed-machine running.

------
personlurking
Just going to throw this one out there. I live in Lisbon, it's tourist-central
(I'm from SF and I've never seen so many tourists). Since I see a ton of lost
people every single day there should be a way to digitally leave comments on
things and places and a free one-stop shop to find such info (like
Wikitravel). This info, although having a central repository, should be pushed
out to an app that connects to one's phone (in particular, GPS) so that when
you need help with figuring out where you are, what statue you're standing in
front of, etc, you can open the app and it tell you (no entering
anything...only if you want to get to another location).

By entering what you want to do beforehand, the app would know where you are
and have a list of places you said you want to go, and tell you how to get to
the next closest place, or alert you if one on your list is about to close for
the day. Perhaps each city version is done by locals and in case of bad
actors, there can be a voting system so the right info goes to the top. Plus,
there could be integration with Google Maps so you can see if you're going the
right way.

~~~
jhardcastle
Reddit for real places rather than links? Upvotes and downvotes, comments
(with upvotes and downvotes). A search function (that actually works) laid
over Google Maps rather than textual links? Interesting.

~~~
raldi
I thought reddit fixed its search function sometime in, like, 2010. What have
you searched for recently that didn't give the results you were looking for?

~~~
raldi
(sound of crickets)

~~~
jhardcastle
You are right. I was unjustly unfair, and my information is outdated. As a
longtime user of the site, I suppose old biases die hard. Thanks for all
you've done to improve things over there.

------
egypturnash
Basically Yelp for transgender surgeons.

I've been working on making the decision as to who I'll get to sculpt new
genitals for me, and researching this on the web is a mess - every site
comparing them is out of date, triggers my mental sketchy spam site detectors,
or both.

It'd be great to be able to go to a nice-looking site and say "all I'm
interested in right now is MtF genital surgery", then see doctors who do that,
and crowd-sourced reviews if their work. (Other people may be interested in
FtM genital surgery, breast augumentation/removal, orichectomy, you get the
idea - various manipulations of genitals and secondary gender cues.)

I think there's probably less than a hundred people who offer these kinds of
services in the world, so it's not exactly a huge database to worry about.

~~~
maxcan
I feel like this is a symptom of a far larger problem, the need for yelp for
medical care in general. Its kind of shitty that there is absolutely no way to
quality and price compare medical providers.

Also, good luck with the transition, I have a friend going through something
similar, its definitely not an easy thing.

~~~
ryanSrich
ZocDoc?

~~~
maxcan
Its a start. I feel like zocdoc is good for looking up doctors who take your
insurance but because the healthcare system itself is so massively broken,
they can't tell you how much a procedure would cost and success rates. I may
be wrong though and hope I am.

------
manish_gill
This might be fairly simple, but I can't find a good solution - A replacement
for Google Groups.

More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or
other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client?

For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like
receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough
either. Google Groups is clunky, and it gives me no good motivation to return
to it. The readability is also not all that great imo. The whole ajaxy thing
it has going for it is also bad. I want to read static text on a functional
and beautiful UI. It's not too much to ask for. :(

~~~
qw
In my opinion, discussions were handled better in the old Usenet days. How
about running a private NNTP server and use one of the programs that forwards
the mailing list to the NNTP server? There are still lots of good NNTP clients
out there like XNews

~~~
sdesol
I can't agree more and what I absolutely loved about Usenet discussions was,
every reply contains a subject line. And it was expected etiquette to change
your subject line if your reply deviates from the parent.

With usenet, I could easily tell what I haven't read and if a branch deviates
from what I'm interested in discussing, I can just ignore that entire branch.

------
harryh
Build a company around creating a best in class development environment that
they can sell to other tech companies. This would involve everything from
repository management (on top of git) to build & compilation tooling to
automated testing and probably more than that eventually.

Once companies reach a certain scale they inevitably expend some of their
resources on building internal development tools. At Foursquare we have 1
person (on a team of ~80) doing this fulltime. Google has spent a ton of
effort on this with blaze. Facebook & Twitter have done similar work. But it's
all fragmented and it's all reinventing the wheel.

A company should do this right for everyone. If it was good enough I'd happily
write very very large checks to use it.

Honestly I think this is what GitHub should be doing, but they don't appear to
have their shit together enough to innovate so someone else should do it.

~~~
simpleAJ
How about Phabricator- [http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/)

~~~
harryh
That's part of the puzzle, but it's (AFAIK) mostly for code review and bug
tracking. I'm very much interested in the build tooling & automated testing (&
probably also deployment) pieces.

~~~
epriest
This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster
(Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release
management) in the pipeline.

------
miguelrochefort
An IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.

For those of you who develop using powerful IDEs (such as Visual Studio,
Eclipse, ...), it's hard to imagine going back to a basic notepad.

Most people, most of the time, don't write software. They exchange ideas,
express wishes, share their feelings. And to do that, they use tools that are
not more powerful than a basic notepad.

This forces them to be explicit, to explain what they mean, to repeat ideas,
to think linearly.

I believe it's time for the average person to have access to tools that are
just as expressive (if not more) than the ones developers have been using for
years. It's time to break the speech metaphor and develop a completely new way
to communicate. It's time for a UI-driven, computer-assisted, general-purpose
language.

What I suggest we build is an IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.

~~~
andrey-p
Interesting idea, but could you elaborate on the practical side of this?

Here's my take on this, in the form a ramble:

Intellisense works really well for code because there's a finite set of, for
instance, methods you can call on a certain object - so I'm assuming you mean
something that's more than just autocompletion.

I'm not really sure language on its own is powerful enough to handle ideas.
When I think of organising thoughts and ideas I normally think of a mind map
type of thing.

However, mind map software is too restrictive in terms of what you can create.
A sheet of paper + pen is an excellent tool for noting down ideas and
thoughts, but paper is finite and ink is irreversible: you can't move
around/delete stuff.

I also sometimes have trouble with situations where idea A and idea B are
related, but are situated at two completely ends of a mind map graph. So this
might mean dispensing with two-dimensional mind maps entirely, but I struggle
to imagine a non-annoying way of displaying a mind map in 3D.

~~~
miguelrochefort
"Thought" might be a better term than "ideas". The purpose of such a tool is
not to brainstorm, but to communicate.

We communicate using natural languages. If you check Twitter, you'll see
people write down all kind of thoughts and information. But this information
is not semantic, and only a human (or NLP) can make sense of what is said.

When people communicate, it's either to make a statement about the past ("I
ate sushis"), about the present ("I'm in Las Vegas"), or about the future ("I
want to watch Terminator 2").

The past and present (which actually are the same) are simple declaration
about reality. The future is all about wishes and intents.

Of course, you could add another dimension/mode (reality/fiction). In fiction,
past/present could be "I wish Hitler wasn't born" and the future could be "I
want to work at Google". In reality, you would say "Dinosaurs existed"
(past/present) and "There will be an hurricane tomorrow" (future). The
difference is that the future is no longer a wish, but a prediction (as we're
dealing with reality).

I want people to be able to communicate the following ideas without just
relying on boring text:

\- The Lego Movie was great.

\- I want to be in NYC by noon.

\- I'm interested in Bitcoin.

\- Lock my house's doors.

\- I want to wake up at 7AM every monday.

\- I'd love to attent to the next Metallica concert in Barcelona.

\- It's rainy in Vancouver.

\- Where is my car?

\- Turn on the oven to high.

The above statements should be purely semantic. I should be able to click on
"Metallica" and get more information about them. I should be able to click on
"event" and see where and when it takes place. I should be able to click on
"car" and see exactly what car he's referring to. I want statements to be
elevated to a level where they have meaning, and that text only is a single
representation of these ideas.

You're in Vancouver? You won't see "It's rainy in Vancouver". You'll see "It's
rainy (here)". If you don't know what Bitcoin is, you might see "John Doe is
interested in [insert a short summary about what Bitcoin is]". If you're
metallica, you'll probably see "3723 people want to see you in Barcelona". If
you're the oven, you'll probably understand "Heat up to 500 F".

Now, the above statements are simple and don't show why someone would need an
IDE for thoughts (NLP + manual confirmation would be enough in many cases).
But people shouldn't limit what they think to 140 characters either. They
should be able to express complex ideas such as (a product review):

    
    
        "iphone" -> "Do you mean iPhone 5S ..." -> Yes
    
        "display" -> "Are you referring to the display of the iPhone ..." -> Yes
    
        - Glossy
        - Cracked
        - Too Dim             ->     Yes
        - _____________
    
        ...
    

As you can see above, it's not easy to express complex interactions with text.
But the idea is that you can input any keyword representing a "thing" (object,
attribute, value), and continue adding nodes by searching for them with
keywords until you have the elements you want to refer to. Then, you can drag
relations between them and see suggestions based on likeliness and what not.
It would of course infer things based on past statements and what it knows
about you.

When writing a product review, people don't always know where to start, and
often repeat things that other have said. By being able to refer to specific
aspects of a product, see what others have said and confirm/infirm their
statement (upvote/downvote), as well as build on top of it is probably a
better way to converge meaning than to ask potential buyers to read through
all of them manually. Maybe this should have his own idea thread.

Basically, I want a semantic version of Twitter that can suggest me things I
can say about things I want to talk about, and let me endorse an existing
statement instead of repeating it.

~~~
sitkack
I see it doing reverse stemming so that the nouns and verbs in the AST are
more simple, like annotating verbs and nouns with a temporal tag.

You type in english, and it generates an AST on the fly. This would allow
conversations to line up and be searchable by content rather than just text.

If the software isn't continually improved I could see it dumbing down the
grammar that the group uses. It could enforce a defacto double-speak.

Another nice side effect, is that you could search by concept. I find this
very very difficult with current search tools.

~~~
miguelrochefort
That's the plan.

------
rhythmvs
A file naming convention (lightweight markup) that would allow us to store
structured (meta)data right inside file names. Obviously inspired by Markdown
and CSV.

We could then build lean, database-less asset management applications, while
the user data (i.e. the files and their metadata) would always be portable,
across platforms.

Take for example:

    
    
      J.M.W. Turner | Rain, Steam and Speed | ···· 1844.jpg
      W. Blake ···· | Newton ·············· | 1795–1805.jpg
    

as compared to the clutter we now must deal with:

    
    
      _IMG00123.JPG
      Turner_-_Rain%2C_Steam_and_Speed_-_National_Gallery_file.jpg
    
    

My practical use case: take snapshots of my incoming receipts, bills, etc.,
name the jpgs using the proposed file naming convention (including fields for
VAT, net amount, etc.), put them in Dropbox, build a parser and accompanying
GUI to edit file names (and their corresponding metadata; have total amounts
etc. being calculated in real time), drop a link to that (web app) interface
to my accountant.

It’s just an idea for HN Idea Sunday; I did a somewhat more detailed write-up:

[https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629](https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629)

~~~
tfgg
I like this. I've often had a similar issue in computational physics when
handling lots of different calculation input/output files with variations in
parameters. I've tended to automatically generate directory hierarchies, e.g.

rc=1.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=1.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

but some standard way of expressing it in the file name would be great, and
nicer to parse out later. There are filesystems that allow metadata, but I've
never seen one really being used for that purpose. You could make some
associated command line tools that are equivalent to 'ls' that allow
splitting/slicing the files down different parameters.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Take a look at hdf5.

~~~
tfgg
Thanks, I'll take a look, but it seems like I'd have to change the format of
the files, right? Unfortunately that's not really feasible, since their format
is determined by the scientific codes I use -- that's why I was attracted to
the idea of using the file name. I can, however, have a go at HDF5 for code
that I write myself.

------
monk_e_boy
Web filter. I love F1 and there is a race today, so I can't look at 99% of the
internet as they will show the result. I will watch the race later when the
kids have gone to bed.

This problem is so big that i have to avoid facebook becaue they also show
trending news.

So a filter that filters F1 or any selectable sports news. Then when i turn it
off after watching the race the filter shows me a list of what news it found
and filtered for me.

Added extra, while i'm watching the race it could show me tweets in real time,
but back shifted so as to make sense with the race.

My football loving buddie also agrees he'd pay for this filter.

~~~
covercash
I don't have HBO, so filtering all Game of Thrones references every Sunday and
Monday would be fantastic.

Not sure I'd pay for that service since it's probably easier to just pay for
HBO and watch it "live" like everyone else.

~~~
kayge
I thought the same thing, but unfortunately a lot of spoilers come in the form
of images. Or maybe fortunately, since it adds an interesting layer of
complexity to this idea.

~~~
fffffffffffffff
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc

~~~
notfoss
Sometimes, I wonder if there really are cats and dogs messing around with
computers...

------
miguelrochefort
Sell anything in a snap.

1\. Find something you want to sell

2\. Snap a picture (or a short video)

3\. Tap "list for sale"

4\. Let mechanical turk + computer vision identify the object

5\. Let the system pick a value (based on sales history, location, demand)

6\. Contact the seller when a serious buyer made a deposit

7\. Proceed to demo + sale

I shouldn't have to write down any spec when selling something as ubiquitous
as an Xbox 360. I shouldn't have to go through 100 different ways to describe
an iPhone 4S when looking to buy one.

Delegating item identification to a third party is how you reduce the friction
of listing items for sale and improve semantics.

And to think that this system only applies to selling items is naive. The
possibilities are endless.

~~~
ogreyonder
Already done:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660089)

[http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png](http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png)

I didn't get much interest so I didn't bother building it :)

~~~
miguelrochefort
I built a prototype too: thingsy.co

It finds all the pictures on Instagram with the hashtag #forsale, post them on
Craigslist, and contact the seller through Instagram when a buyer emails the
Craigslist contact info.

Craigslist killed it.

~~~
flylib
there is a lot of activity in this sector right now, including some VC funded
startups, the approach they are taking is to grab instagram #forsale pics then
post it on their own storefront site

~~~
miguelrochefort
Really? Do you have any example?

~~~
flylib
this is the best one I seen - [https://10s.ec](https://10s.ec)

a few others

[http://new.soldsie.com/instagram-selling/](http://new.soldsie.com/instagram-
selling/)

[https://paytagz.com](https://paytagz.com) (Member of
[http://boost.vc](http://boost.vc))

~~~
miguelrochefort
Cool thanks!

------
raldi
Unlike "Who is hiring?" posts, which are ephemeral, "Idea Sunday" posts
continue being useful for a long time. Therefore, consider posting a link at
the end of each one allowing readers to jump to the previous one.

~~~
tobr
Linking to a search might do!

[https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/0/%22ask%20hn%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/0/%22ask%20hn%20idea%20sunday%22)

------
Bootvis
A bit lame maybe but here it goes:

The "Ready for Battle alarm clock". An alarm clock that wakes you up with your
favourite quotes from video games or movies such as:

\- Rise and shine, Mister Freeman. Rise and... shine. Not that I... wish to
imply you have been sleeping on the job. No one is more deserving of a rest,
and all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until... well, let's
just say your hour has... come again. (or part of this one).

\- It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum... and I'm all outta gum

This idea would work best when you always wear your Google Glass like device.
Then the audio can be combined with a nice visual of for instance the G-Man.

For now, without the glass integration, it's easy to do make this with your
own phone. A nice service could be to personalize the message, i.e. "Wake up
Mr. Bootvis...".

The big problem here is that just copying these audio samples isn't allowed
and so it will be hard to build a company out of this.

~~~
kbar13
that would be cool, but wearing glasses while sleeping is not recommended.

~~~
a3n
Contacts and cochlear implants.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Contacts are worse (..other than the ones you can sleep in). Seriously though,
sleeping with your alarm clock makes it too easy to snooze anyway - we should
just project the image and go hologram later. :)

------
basicallydan
I've been sitting on this gem for a while. I present to you: The Bruce Wayne
Gap Year.

Wealthy people with desires to become Batman can more-or-less do so.

First they sign a waiver and an NDA, removing any liability from the Bruce
Wayne Gap Year company. Then they'll pay the company tens of thousands of
dollars to pay for what is to come.

They'll be put into a real criminal gang [1], and taken around the world
getting involved in all sorts of illegal [2] activities.

Sooner or later they'll be subtly led to the Himalayas, where they'll join a
monastery, lead a simple life of celibacy and minimalism and slowly learn to
meditate and fully understand themselves and their body.

After a while, they'll be groomed by a man [3] claiming to be working for a
mysterious and powerful leader of a guild of assassins, and taught all kinds
of martial arts over months and months, culminating in a complex battle which
determines their eligibility. At that point, they will be asked to do
something their morals will not allow (this will be determined in a
psychological screening), and end up betraying and destroying [4] the guild.

Then they return home, better for the experience.

It can't fail. A friend of mine also suggested it be re-implemented for all
sorts of action hero/film type situations. James Bond, Die Hard, Rambo, etc.
It's essentially a very expensive, realistic roleplaying experience.

[1]: Actually, very highly paid and well-trained actors. We don't tell them
that though.

[2]: Mostly not illegal, but they're made to believe that these things are
illegal. Some things will be borderline (they may accidentally end up
threatening people who are not part of the ruse, for example), hence the NDA.

[3]: Also an actor. A very good, very well paid actor. Possibly we'll just get
Liam Neeson, and he'll act so well that he'll convince them that he's not Liam
Neeson.

[4]: Not really. The martial artists will never be allowed to be worse than
the client, and will also be stunt-trained and capable of faking death.

~~~
huhtenberg
Wealthy people who are in a physical condition to do this, don't have time.

Wealthy people who have time, don't have health.

And those who have both, won't even talk to you.

~~~
Cryode
Mainly because they are already Batman.

------
wting
There's a lot of parallel conversations on Reddit / HN / etc. for various
articles.

Would about pulling high rated, top-level conversations from multiple sources
for a quick digest? Sort of like Google News for commentary.

~~~
loomio
As someone who often appreciates the comments as much or more than the content
- yes! I often come across articles in places other than Reddit or HN and wish
I could do a "reverse lookup" to see where it might have been submitted just
so I can read the comments.

~~~
rahimnathwani
There's a Chrome add-on which uses the Algolia API to do this. It adds a pop-
out side bar showing the HN comments for the page/article you're currently
reading. You must be on the page submitted, rather than on a comments page,
though.

~~~
avalaunch
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
sideba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
sidebar/ngljhffenbmdjobakjplnlbfkeabbpma/related?hl=en-US)

------
rjf1990
Airbnb, but paid with labor.

Many travelers are short on cash but would love to trade services for a
night's stay. Me, I would be happy to host a guest for free provided they did
my dishes or laundry.

Many homeowners, especially empty-nesters, have homes with plenty of space
that they still have to maintain. This would provide benefits to both parties.

~~~
kbar13
hm, this could have some legal / human rights issues potentially.

~~~
spellboots
So does Airbnb...

~~~
kbar13
afaik, airbnb requests that the travelers pay using fiat money, not labor.

------
yzhou
Here's what I want: A cheap text ssh terminal with wifi,or cellular, nice
keyboard hardware, with extremely long battery life (or solar powered), which
i can just throw it in my car and forget it. Whenever I am away of my computer
I can always log in to my cloud server and write codes or do some quick fixes.

~~~
krishna2
This should be possible with a Kindle. The basic Kindle costs $50 or so. And
it is a fork of Android. And has a month of battery life. There are some
Kindle-roots [Search "root a kindle"]. Would something like this work for you?
The keyboard will still be the kindle-keyboard.

The other option is a cheap ipad with a bluetooth keyboard. If you turn off
all the unnecessary apps and notifications and put it on airplane mode - it
should last a couple of weeks. You turn it on only when you need it. You will
still need to get an ssh app [many available].

~~~
sarthakk
The basic Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite don't use Android. It's only the higher
end models like Kindle Fire that use the Android fork.

------
mden
Idea: Tree of knowledge

Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with
explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you
didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back
by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and
from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to
get discouraged a few hours in? I know I have and it's a pain!

A well built knowledge map that would graph the relationships between
different topics in a field would help alleviate this problem. Take for
example linear algebra. You've heard about this fancy thing called singular
value decomposition but barely know what a matrix is. You type SVD into a
search box, and it generates a breadth first tree with all the topics you need
to know to be able to understand SVD up to a certain depth. And then you just
work from the leafs that you do understand up to the topic you are interested.
This saves hours or sometimes days of just trying to understand the ordering
in which you should be learning things. It essentially builds a curriculum for
the user on the fly for a topic they are interested.

I would propose this as a community wiki so knowledge maps could be
crowdsourced and curated as they would be time consuming and difficult to
build for a single person. Would also suggest adding the ability to let users
create accounts and mark off topics they feel confident they know.

Potential problems: The two big problems with this idea are 1) generating a
proper knowledge map: There will be ambiguities in the edges and even the
nodes of a map. Sometimes (often) you will need to be clever how you organize
the information. For example, your have a dependency listing like: Matrix <\-
Rotation Matrix, but in reality it might be better to have something like
Matrix <\- Linear Transform <\- Rotation Matrix. Linear transforms would act
as an intermediary node for rotation, scaling, shearing, w/e.

2) a topics can be studied in different frameworks: E.g. linear algebra can be
studied with or without using vector spaces. Once again, deciding how to
create the knowledge graph will be difficult.

Solution: Have multiple types of edges. You can have edges to signify hard
dependencies, soft dependencies, generalizations, and extensions. Maybe other
types of edges. You will still need to be clever, but having a way to signify
the relationship between topics will help resolve the problem.

~~~
dominotw
You mean something like this

[https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard](https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard)

but for all knowledge?

~~~
mden
Yes, but as a wiki and with the additional edge information + breadth first
listing as I mentioned. It doesn't have to be as finely split up as this one
but maybe it should.

I have to say I'm really impressed by their progress since the last time I
checked their knowledge map (~2 years ago).

------
marpalmin
A kind of task rabbit that will connect expats ( who don't speak the language)
with locals. The idea is that the local will help the expat in small tasks
like understanding an insurance policy, housing contract, employment receipt.

~~~
sounds
Sounds interesting!

But would the company be able to build brand? First, to find expats would be
somewhat difficult as they tend to blend in! Second, the company would need to
be careful which people they hired, so they might be able to start at the top
end of the market (high rates, high quality service) and work down from
there...

That gives me the idea that it could start from an already existing service-
oriented company, whether that's landscaping, security, legal services,
accounting, etc. and they could just add translation and a more taskrabbit-
like approach (phone app, etc.)

~~~
marpalmin
Yea you got a point. However, I think you should pay a small fee, let's say 10
euros for the help. I used to live in the netherlands and it happened to me
many times that I didnt understand contracts, bills, etc and I got tired to
ask friends/coworkers to help me with that. I would pay a small fee to have an
external part to do it. I think it would work better targetting high skilled
expats in European cities with lot of them where the native language is not
English like Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin.

------
DanBC
== Dying Skills, Lost Tech ==

I knew a chap who could roof a home with Cotswold stone. He knew how the stone
was quarried (but he didn't do that bit) and how it was made into roof tiles
(but he didn't do that bit very often) and he knew how to roof a house using
those tiles. There are not that many people who can do that anymore.

There's a meme about the NASA Saturn V rockets that says we've lost the
paperwork and thus re-making them would be cery hard, and could involve
rediscovering technology.

The Domesday project is sometimes used as an example of digital obselesance
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project)

And here's an example of someone looking for Cray software and code and
documentation
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464546)

So, this would be a site that interviews people (using crowdsourced
interviews) to glean information about how they do or did things, and why,
with video if possible of them demonstrating the techniques and equipment and
methods.

This would be a teeny bit like the Endangered Language Project.
[http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/](http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/)

There would need to be some way to control for truth and accuracy[1] and also
some suggestions for what is a good interview.

[1] my dad used to tell quite a few lies. One of these (well, one set) was
about his diabetes diagnosis and treatment. He claimed he had been diagnosed
as a child while still at school, and that he had to sharpen his syringe on
the stone floor. Utter cobblers, but somehow it found its way to an academic
site. I sent them a polite email and they made their disclaimers about
uncorroborated etc a bit clearer.

~~~
lesterbuck
This sounds similar to the BBC Mastercrafts series:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvrcj/episodes/guide](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvrcj/episodes/guide)

It came highly recommended to me, and the six episodes are sitting on my disk,
but I haven't gotten around to watching any yet.

------
miguelrochefort
A system to compose and track drug/supplement stacks, regimen and diets.

Transforming yourself has never been more accessible than it is today. We have
access to so much information and so many resources that there's rarely any
valid excuse not to become what you want to be. The problem is that the whole
process can be overwhelming, and finding what works for you requires
discipline and dedication. Most results don't happen overnight, and the only
way to get through months of imperceptible progress is to have a clear plan,
track everything, and learn from others.

I've seen all kinds of people in all kinds of context attempting to share some
regimen with others. You will find that on Oprah, in books, at the gym, at
your doctors, on forums, etc. That's all fine, but why do they still have to
write down the name of the product, the brand, the posology, the side-effects,
their interactions, everything by hand? Wouldn't it be easier for them to
write them down with a tool that understands what the regimen means, and
easier for us to add them to our own regimen in a single click?

Once the system understands what I (and others) want to achieve, how I
progress and exactly what I do to reach it, only good things can come out of
it. It can learn (machine learning, correlation finding), it can recommend
tweaks, it can help me acquire products, it can reward me, etc.

How hard is it to set-up a database of all drugs/supplements/vitamins, and let
people semantically fill the why, what, when and how?

I don't think there's a lack of niches either:

\- Bodybuilding

\- Cognitive enhancement (nootropics)

\- Weight loss

\- Hair loss

\- Skin care

\- Allergies

\- Acne

\- Long distance running

\- Diets (vegan, paleo)

\- Chronic disease

\- Life extension

~~~
lhenriquez
I've been looking into a very similar idea. There's a fair amount of prior art
in this area, but I feel that no one has nailed it by including the right
level of data sharing and practitioner motivation in a way that lets the
ecosystem learn from experimentation and improve while not running afoul of
HIPPA. If you're interested in exploring the idea more lets connect :
[http://www.linkedin.com/in/loganhenriquez/](http://www.linkedin.com/in/loganhenriquez/)

------
keithwarren
RAID Arrays for online storage services.

So many services offer a free tier, maybe 5gb for free and then you pay after
that. Some are much higher. Build sort of a proxy to these services so that
you have a distributed and large free online storage system.

This was an idea my team had last year when we were looking closely at a photo
organization and management startup. We had won a startup competition, had
investors tender offers but in the end we decided not to pursue the idea
primarily because the storage business absolutely sucks, and photo systems are
inherently storage businesses. This idea of 'BYOS' (Bring your own storage)
was one of the hacks we thought up to get around the problem but in the end
customer discovery taught us that the idea had too much friction for most
people. Tech folks loved it, 35 year old moms didn't.

You can simply start with a few of the larger players, use the service to
connect your free DropBox, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts. There may even
be a monetization option wherein as you approach saturation of the storage you
push the user to sign up with a specific vendor for a discounted deal and that
other vendor can be a partner company or your own storage medium.

It has to be simple and transparent though, you still want people to have that
simply sync experience regardless of where the file is stored and they should
be able to view all the files across all the services at one time, regardless
of where they are physically stored.

~~~
jarofgreen
Seen [https://trovebox.com/](https://trovebox.com/) ? It started out as a
thing kind like this, an Open Source photo service that could use any backend
you configured, but now appears to be some kinda B2B service .... shame.

------
siruva07
I'm responsible for purchasing our computer equipment for our startup. Every
time I make a purchase on our company (@MakeSpace) credit card, I have to
remember to send an email to our accountants (record the purchase as an asset,
depreciation for taxes, etc).

More importantly, it's hard to keep track of what equipment was given to each
employee. I imagine at a larger company this would be handled by an IT
department, but sub 50 people I'm doing this on a spreadsheet myself. Would
love a simple web app to record serial # of machine, receipt (that I could
upload PDF), date purchased, employee, etc.

Happily would pay monthly SaaS. Please message me if anyone knows of this type
of product. I'd happily be your first customer if you want to build it.

edit: Happy Easter!

~~~
Theodores
Someone can sell/make you a tool for that however you can also do it yourself
with a simple Google Docs spreadsheet. Your accountant will understand it as
will anyone else that has to maintain it. You get versioning built in so you
can see who has changed what. Plus you can make it read only.

Regarding the receipts, have a folder and just give the receipts a simple
date-supplier-what-for filename. You could probably paste the hyperlinks into
your spreadsheet if you could be bothered. If you can't then they are easy
enough to find.

~~~
siruva07
"you can do it yourself with a simple Google Doc"

Isn't this how ZeroCater got started?

The features for this (act 2) make it very interesting. Imagine one slick sell
to post to CL / Ebay.

------
nathanathan
[X-post from the previous Idea Sunday thread that didn't make it to the front
page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132)]

Idea: Git-story, a website that generates summary narratives from git commit
histories and other github data.

Here's a brain-dump with some ideas for the specifics:

Use foreshadowing: "It all started with one person, X, spending months to
gradually build what would one day become Y, a project forked by hundreds and
starred by thousands."

When someone makes their first contribution to a project give them a brief
introduction, like a shorter version of
[http://osrc.dfm.io/](http://osrc.dfm.io/)

Use sentiment analysis on commit messages to say things like "Frustrations
mount as...", "the developers rejoice after..."

When people work on multiple concurrent branches use use phrases like:
Meanwhile, X and Y toil away on the new Z feature.

Use the time between commits to chunk them into single sentences/paragraphs.
Also, add comments if the project goes dormant, or if there is a spike in
development.

Use keywords in commit messages like merge, revert, resolve to generate events
in the story.

When bugs are resolved look for linked issues and use the age of the bug and
number of comments to say thinks like "X finally fixed the controversial Y
bug"

~~~
danohuiginn
Neat idea. It's a bit like that facebook auto-generated video, but for github.

Include a decent plugin architecture, and you could get lots of contributions
to add in data from everyone's pet CI system, bugtracker, download counter,
etc.

[actually, if you started with something like Rails, you could launch versions
from old code, take screenshots, and stitch together a video]

------
rdl
A tablet (iPad or Android) game which is designed to be used while exercising.

Use ANT or Bluetooth 4.0LE to tie into a treadmill, bike, or other exercise
equipment to get output measurements (speed); ideally, find some devices which
allow two way commands (not common at all right now).

Networked games against other people, or vs. computer or past personal
performance. The interesting part is a "use while running" interface for the
touchscreen, requiring inputs (using gross motor skills, not fine control) to
do things in-game while retaining performance. Or maybe use audio output for
instructions (i.e. "press the blue button, then the red, then the green" while
keeping heart BPM above 130, and targets moving on screen.

~~~
hershel
[http://toshnology.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/goji-play-
making-30...](http://toshnology.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/goji-play-
making-30-minutes-of-exercise.html)

------
gus_massa
Current “Idea Sunday” thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132)
(14 points, 7 hours ago, 22 comments)

~~~
jeroen
That (earlier) thread has now been killed.

------
11thEarlOfMar
I frequently wonder if there is a place on the planet I'd be happier in. The
idea is a site that allows me to select a wide variety of attributes and then
search for places in the world that match those attributes. For attributes
that I only care about only generally, I'd be able to select from a broad
category. For those that I care a lot about, I'd be able to drill in to highly
granular selections.

For example, I may only care that: : Government = Democracy

But for climate, something a little more specific: : Climate : Rainfall < 200
cm : Climate : Snowfall = 0 cm

And then something really granular: : Sports & Leisure : Adventure Sports :
Sky Diving < 50 km

Major categories might include: • Climate • Geography • Demographics •
Government • Infrastructure • Security • Entertainment • Recreation • Culture
• Education • Economy

It could be marketed as a branded plugin for company web sites in travel, real
estate and jobs. They'd pay for clicks and then use the results to market
their services.

I've found sites that offer this, but none have been quite what I wanted. One
requires you to enter the locations you think you'd like and then helps you
decide. Another was pretty close, but only covered the USA.

~~~
roma1n
I would like the same service for jobs I might enjoy.

~~~
squintychino
They have this. It's called 'any job search engine out there'. They all let
you put in these search parameters to get back jobs that meet your criteria.

------
rokhayakebe
I compiled different ideas over the week.

coMarketing: I would like to see a solution that allows smaller companies that
target a similar audience to be able to put their "little" marketing dollar
together and have a better chance at fighting the big guy.

Phone screen on my computer: When I am at my desk, I want to be able to use my
phone from my computer. I can use the desktop interface to go through
contacts, check feeds, answer texts, and even forward calls to my desk phone.

Conversation blog: A blogging platform that is based on discussion. Each blog
post is a conversation between two or more people, let us stop the monologues
because in real life to hear two is more interesting than one.

Alarm Band: A simple band that wakes me up with a buzz, but I just want to
spend $25 for it.

PHP wrapper: I began to write a simple consistency wrapper for PHP, but I
never finished. Basically it a class that gives me a clear structure on how to
pass parameters for functions. I ALWAYS know to do function something
(haystack, needle) then the wrapper rearranges according to the actual
function requirement.

~~~
shanacarp
If I could figure out how to do comrketing - I would

~~~
rokhayakebe
I work for a company that targets dentists. I am always thinking if we could
run a direct mail campaign with 3 or 4 other companies targeting the same
audience we can reduce our cost by more than 1/3 and we can offer awesome
packages to clients.

The same is true for paid search, facebook, etc...

------
gbrits
Related to @mden's Idea: Tree of knowledge.

Chrono: chronological inventions and academic breakthroughs of mankind as a
dependency graph. This is a lingering idea that has been coming back to me a
couple times a year over the last decade or so.

What if there's a kind of semantic wikipedia that is built upon a dependency
graph of inventions and academic breakthroughs. What led to the invention of
the internet, to nano-tubes, etc? How cool would it be from an education
standpoint to be able to jump back in time and see invention upon invention
replayed (with backgrounds on how these breakthroughs came to be) up to today.

Check out what led to invention X (the galaxy S you're reading this on),
played back . Or reversely, lookup which inventions were build (transitively)
upon the discovery of Y. You'd also finally be able to answer definitively who
was more important: Tesla or Edison ;)

Socio-economic backgrounds, anecdotes, etc. what led to invention X, and how X
was important for Y, etc. An interactive "Short history of nearly everything"

~~~
lesterbuck
You will love watching the old BBC series Connections, which is exactly about
the thread of inspiration behind many inventions:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29)

------
neilsharma
Problem: Completion rates for online courses are dismal and engagement with
other students and faculty is low.

Idea: Weekly online, live discussion sections to accompany self-paced video
lectures. Discussion sections have 5-10 students and are facilitated by
Teaching Assistants

How it works:

Students taking a MOOC course sign up each week for a discussion section.
There can be multiple discussion sections to accommodate changes in the
student's schedule, different time zones, etc. Students pay ~$10/discussion,
once a week, for an hour.

Discussion sections can be G+ Hangout style and taught by crowdsourced
Teaching Assistants. These TAs can be grad students in universities looking to
make extra money. They can assist students with HW problems, go over tough
concepts, and talk about material outside of the immediate subject matter.

TAs can rev share per discussion. Example: 30% rev share for a class of eight
students paying $10 each --> $24 for the TA for an hour of teaching. This is
significantly higher than market rate (~$10-16/hr)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Is it really a problem that completion rates are low though? I'd argue that
most people's time is better spent on things other than taking online courses.

I'm a proponent of making education accessible, but it seems that it is fairly
easy to find good resources to learn just about anything online, particularly
if it is related to computing. The real problem I think is motivation. Most
college students don't try that hard in school, so I wouldn't expect most
people taking online courses (particularly free ones) to try that hard either.

If you're motivated enough to learn the resources are already available to
you. If not, I think the efforts of others to make you learn will have
marginal effects at best.

Edit: I was replying to the first point about completion rates being low. I
actually think the discussion idea is a good one and would be helpful for
those who actually want to learn the material.

~~~
neilsharma
I think you're right that low completion rates aren't a problem. I don't have
specific numbers, but I'd presume that most students who fail to complete an
online course aren't motivated going in and are merely sampling or browsing.
They'd probably drop out regardless and skew the completion rate horridly.

For everyone else, I'd imagine the motivation level is higher because of
voluntary enrollment than a college student's who is forced to take certain
classes.

Also, the current iteration of online education can survive on unassisted
self-motivation. I can't recall the specific stat, but I believe 80%+ of
students taking coursera classes already have a bachelor's degree. Most
classes tend to be technical, where online resources are free and plenty. And
given the self-paced nature of online classes, most students who learn best in
group environments are probably pre-filtered and never sign up.

Perhaps discussions would be even more relevant as online education becomes
more mass-adopted? Group tutoring for home-schooled kids, KUMON classes taught
online, K-12 education where students need more hand holding, liberal arts
classes where answers are subjective and can't be auto-graded, etc.

------
sambeau
A meetings clock that counts UP the price of a meeting based on the the
salaries of the people in the room.

~~~
3rd3
What would be the effect of it?

~~~
kbar13
to keep aware of how long meetings affect productivity in $ sense for
business/management-minded people, I would assume.

------
binarymax
Food Golf.

(Code golf - for recipes). A community where members submit recipes. Score is
a function of ingredient count and cooking time. The lower the better. Recipes
are also rated for taste/quality by the community.

~~~
DanBC
I am reminded of the bits of Reamde that talk about recombinant cooking -
people take two existing prepared food items and mix them to get something
else. EG: a can of mushroom soup, a can of tuna and a pack of ramen noodles.
(Sounds revolting).

But I like the idea. Perhaps a twist could be to prepare a weeks worth of
meals using the least ingredients - people are allowed a small set of regular
items for the pantry (plain flour, milk, granulated sugar, salt) but have to
use or reuse a limited set of ingredients to create a tasty nurritious menu
for a week on a tight budget.

------
pubby
A twitter/imageboard system where it takes 2 weeks for messages to appear once
posted. The idea being that messages still relevant in 2 weeks are important
and interesting ones.

~~~
NoodleIncident
I had a similar idea a while ago.

Basically: a reddit/HN clone, but at any given time only one article can be
commented on. That article is replaced every day or every hour (whatever
interval makes sense) with the highest-upvoted submission that doesn't have
comments yet.

The goal would be to encourage deeper discussion of matters, rather than
fleeting posts. I have no idea if tree-style comments would be better than
just a simple forum thread. A major part of the site would also be scrolling
through all of the past articles, and being able to read all of the previous
discussions.

~~~
Spittie
That's a really nice idea, I'm sure such a site has the potential to generate
very high-quality discussions about a topic.

The only problem I see, is that the audience of HN (and Reddit even more) is
big and has many different interests. It's very hard to cover those interests
with only an article a day, and many might just lose interests after a bunch
of days without anything interesting for them. Moving the cadence down would
probably help, I think the sweet spot might be around 4/6 articles a day.

I think I'd also try to bring down the number of submissions compared to HN.
HN gets a lot of those, and it's good, but I don't think it would be healthy
for such a site. I can think off limiting the number of submissions an account
can do every day/week, limiting submissions to accounts older than X days
(this is mostly to avoid spam) and/or having a pay-for-submission system (not
real money, but karma or other similar things).

------
karangoeluw
Ok I'll go first.

It's an "Imgur for audio files".

Now there's times when you record an audio and want to share it. What do you
do? Uhh,, umm.... Yup. exactly. There's no reliable, easy-to-use app to share
audio files (not music).

So, this is a web/mobile app for easily uploading and sharing audio files, and
playing them. I don't have a full plan laid out, but I'll work on it for sure.

(If you'd like to be notified when it's done, let me know:
[http://eepurl.com/SRIPT](http://eepurl.com/SRIPT))

~~~
wxm
In what way would it be different from SoundCloud? No fancy commenting?
Anonymous uploads?

~~~
4ngle
The big thing about imgur is the community. Consider the front page of imgur.
I think that's the cool thing about the idea.

You usually go to Soundcloud because you're linked there, it's not something
that easily builds its own culture.

~~~
dwiel
Soundcloud has a nice culture. I go there both to discover music and to listen
to music I've liked. It's different than imgur but I think that partly is just
due to the fact that it takes anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour to experience
each 'piece' compared to an image which you can digest in a few seconds and
flip through a bunch when you need to burn a minute or two.

~~~
karangoeluw
You bring up an interesting point:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614790)

------
LazerBear
GitHub for mathematicians.

For every theory, define its axioms and valid logical steps. Let anyone build
theorems based on these (validate them automatically), and allow people to
fork others theorems to create their own.

It's probably possible to get a lot of proofs from projects like Mizar and
Metamath to start with, then let the community build on top of it.

Maybe even a crowd sourced bounty program for unproven theorems, like P=NP.
Let people pledge and automatically pay to whoever proves or disproves it.

I think this can really change how mathematical research is done.

~~~
neonhash
> validate them automatically

That's the hard part. There is some research being done in that are really
interesting, such as

* Koepke, Schröder, Cramer with Naproche [http://www.naproche.net/index.php](http://www.naproche.net/index.php)

* Paskevich with SAD (unfortunately he stopped his research) [https://web.archive.org/web/20131207185950/http://nevidal.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131207185950/http://nevidal.org/sad.en.html)

~~~
LazerBear
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the problem. If your users submit
their proofs one line at a time, then validating each line is O(1) if they
give you the assumptions they used and the steps they took.

Edit: In case I wasn't clear, I didn't mean anything like natural language
processing (though that would be awesome). I meant very strict formal math
where everything is explicit.

------
fest
Ordering prototype (3d printing, CNC machining, lasercutting) parts,
reimagined. It's a major pain just to get a few parts made- first you find a
company that does that, e-mail them their design, they get back to you with a
quote and you either accept it or go back to step 1.

What if you could just upload your design, select a material from catalogue
and receive an instant quote. If you're happy with it, order the parts and
then either pick them up in person or have them delivered.

~~~
yankoff
There are services like that. Check out
[https://www.ponoko.com](https://www.ponoko.com)

~~~
fest
Exactly like this (sad smile).

------
PopcornTimer
Mixergy specifically for bootstrapped solopreneurs/micropreneurs except NO
video interview or a lot of the unnecessary info.

I want something I can read (comprehensive guides) with specific background
info on insider knowledge per industry or cool things they did that made the
company a success.

Mixergy interviews are often too long, too much noise to sift through, and not
enough core information.

Examples of things I've love to see... Say you are building a physical
product... How did you go about figuring/developing the prototype. If its
hardware, where did you go to get the prototype done (PCB boards, etc..). How
did you figure out manufacturing, if its overseas, how did you coordinate
(different language, sourcer, shipping information, quality control, etc...).

If you're in the food industry, how did you manage to get contacts to help you
get your product into stores, how did you develop or manufacture the product,
etc.. If you're in catering, how did you go about reaching specific clients
before you were known, etc...

The things people want to know are the details that are difficult to find that
could be useful. I don't care much for the stories (success or failure doesn't
matter as much as the core background on how things got done).

~~~
karangoeluw
I'd like to do this. If anyone has the connections and would like to help out,
email me karan@goel.im

------
huherto
A corporate firewall where employees can control which sites they want to stay
away from.

I don't know if this exists. But some companies don't ban some sites because
they don't want to appear to be too controlling.

I personally do this by changing my own /etc/hosts file, but it is too easy to
override. A firewall solution my be better for technical and not technical
employees to help them to control their own browsing addictions.

------
s369610
Idea: ShowMeThere (needs better name, camanywhere?)

An phone/web app that allows you to click on a place in google maps and
request a "cammer" for x minutes, you pay $x and anyone running the software
on their phone that is near that location can accept the offer and start
streaming video from their phone to you, allowing you to have a kind of "live"
street view.

There is UI for the payer to click on arrows to inform the cammer to move here
or there, and to zoom or focus on certain things, also a pre translated set of
things to help communicate with cammer. Cammer gets paid after the x minutes
is up.

Cammer gets cheap money for being a personal camera man for someone somewhere
else in the world.

Client saves a trip out there to see something for himself.

Use cases: Want to see if an antique you are looking for is at the markets but
cant get away from work?. Want to check out markets in turkey but live in
australia? Want to see what the surf is "really" like right now and whether
you should bother heading out? Police work/chases! heaps of uses.

For popular events and markets, a cammer could setup shop and offer high
quality streams etc.

~~~
2511
like this idea. Though it looks like Ustream is already doing it. Also the
challenges with the app: How to ensure that the video was actually shot on
that particular location. What if the "cammer" turns off location settings?

------
hershel
One of the biggest problem in the new field of medical apps is lack of
verification: how do i as a doctor or patient know if an app works, and how
well ?

Of course this problem is generic for many types of products.Reviews are a
partial solution ,but it would be quite useful to have a site that gathers
research and helps in creating valid research on various products.

------
martinaglv
tl;dr Independent store for bookmarkable HTML5 mobile apps

This is an idea that I had recently, but for which unfortunately I have no
time. I hope that some of you folks can make it happen.

The idea is that with the recent release of Chrome for Android's "Add to Home
Screen" feature, there is now a way to bookmark websites to the home screen of
every mobile os. Mobile sites can add a meta tag to hide the browser chrome
and look fully native. Combined with fast mobile processors, this means that
we can finally have native-like experience only by using HTML.

It may be difficult to build a business around it, and could make more sense
if it is crowd-sourced (the database could be hosted as json on a github
repo).

I haven't done much research, but I believe that an independent store which
collects these apps, makes them discoverable, and instructs people how to
install them would be very useful, and will do a great job for promoting the
freedom of the web over closed app stores.

~~~
seanwalker08
I am working on a user submitted solution to html5 apps now and had a question
for you. Is your idea to host the apps instead of just linking to them like a
typical user submitted site does? If you wanted to chat a little about it, my
contact info is in my profile here.

------
Buetol
An anonymous and representative group discussion and voting system

Practical example: Attending a conf as a woman

\- You want to ask questions during the talks but you are afraid that because
you are a woman your answer will be "dumbed-down" or just different

\- Also, the guy doing the talk would like to answer the best possible
question (or a random one)

So, there can be a lot of solutions to this problem, here is mine:

\- Every attendee get an anonymous account on discuss.confname.org

\- So everyone can ask questions anonymously and also it's fair because
everyone has only one account

Except, that I made up this example in 5 minutes. This problem is effectively
on every possible group in the world. People would like to express their
opinions inside the group without risking differentiation.

I tried to describe this idea and the implementation (
[http://kioto.io](http://kioto.io) ), but it's really hard to explain. So I'm
just implementing a prototype right now to better explain this idea.

~~~
dzink
This does exactly that and you don't even create an account, so it's really
anonymous: [http://www.gosoapbox.com/](http://www.gosoapbox.com/) . All you
have to get is a shared url for the dicussion. Their primary use case is for
classroom discussion, but functionality is what you described.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
SSL record to long, can't get in. Broken.

------
pnathan
Chores service.

For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively
flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore.

Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it
gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the
apartment building is poorly laid out.

I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want
someone for random house maintenance tasks.

I'm half-tempted to do this where I live - I live near both a university and a
fairly well-off suburb. Pretty sure a freshman would appreciate odd-job work
not far from campus.

The catch is that I don't really have time to deal with bonding, insurance,
payroll, workman's comp, etc, etc. Someone with 10-20K, familiarity with the
process, lots of flex time over the next 4-6 months (when your help gets sick,
YOU get to do it. =) ), and a yen for business could probably make a tidy
income from it.

~~~
spaboleo
Think of this from the viewpoint of changing demographic: People get older and
need to taken care of, which is shockingly expensive.

There are several attempts, with prototyped like housing/neighborhood
scenarios, where the younger generations (students) live together with the
elderly. Older people might live in the ground-level apartments, while the
young students wouldn't worry about walking up 2-3 flights of stairs. They
could do some shopping, basic housekeeping, watch them take the right
medication in the morning. In return the elderly could return the favor by
exchanging non-monetary things, like home-made food. Or they could just pay
for the students to lower their rent.

All those solutions are great, but they require serious building of
infrastructure, which can't be done immediately.

So services like the one described above seem to be an intermediate solution.
The problem is that all those "micro-tasks" (take the cleaning the litterbox
example) are too easy/short to be paid a sufficient amount of money to be
done. It's an entirely different league if you pay a gardener to come to your
house twice a week for 3-4 hours. And even gardeners/poolboys etc. have issues
if they have to drive from client to client for 30min. or more.

It would be great if there would be a platform that allows people living
geographically close together share a qualified person doing specific
services. Take someone walking their dogs every morning as an example. The
cost can be shared amongst 6-10 dog owners. While the time spent for walking
6-10 dogs might only double (you need time to collect and return them) instead
of increasing 6-10 fold.

So the service should bundle and curate requests from a neighborhood or house.
If a couple requests are similar, like "I would love someone to clean my
windows every X weeks." They get bundled into a service package for which
local contractors provide a quote. And other people living in the neighborhood
can then pledge for the service. With every new customer joining the average
price is lowered for everyone.

Kind of like a curated form of a cross between taskrabbit and kickstarter.

~~~
pnathan
I _completely agree_. I think that the effective way to start this would be to
get a high-rise to buy into the idea. If you have 10 floors of apartments all
in the same building, you have some good time efficiency and can start sharing
resources - i.e., a big bin to throw bags of cat crap in that can be trundled
down the hall from apartment to apartment.

I like your angle on how it'd help the elderly. It might be an interesting way
to put together a 'senior living' neighborhood in conjunction with a
developer. You could contract with the developer that your labor force would
handle the big lifting duties; on the buy side, the rent would be marginally
higher (and spread out over the development). Perhaps that already exists
though.

------
genericsteele
Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks

I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations.
It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the
community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a
real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

~~~
egypturnash
Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of
"Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in
MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with
one person asking a question, and another offering _three_ funny answers, plus
a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a
good comeback is rehearsing a bunch of them beforehand, so you have something
ready.

(For instance sometimes I like to wear little horns glued to my forehead while
looking otherwise normal. People regularly ask me "are those real?" By
repeatedly answering that question, I now know that some variant of "yeah, I
used to file them down, but I've been letting them grow out because I've been
busy" will get a laugh.)

------
kidlogic
Yelp for Manufacturing - help hardware startups determine which manufacturer
fits their needs and remove the question of whether or not they're working
with someone qualified

~~~
lesterbuck
This is actually a serious problem, and really solving it would be very, very
profitable. For an example of the issues involved, listen to the Mixergy
interview by the founders of TouchFire, and iPad keyboard. They describe the
baroque method of hiring a manufacturing consultant so you don't get eaten
alive by a bad Chinese manufacturer.

[http://mixergy.com/steven-isaac-touchfire-
interview/](http://mixergy.com/steven-isaac-touchfire-interview/)

Let me know if you would like to talk more about this. Contact info is in my
profile.

~~~
kidlogic
shot contact over linkedin + twitter. Let's chat!

------
adamzerner
Skimmable video. Like this -
[http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)

Like any platform, there's the chicken-egg problem. I'm not sure how you'd get
enough content, but I'm confident that if you had enough content, it'd be
better than YouTube.

But starting off getting content wouldn't be that hard though. You could take
currently existing YouTube videos and make them skimmable. And you could
convince people to make videos for your site because the quality is so high.

And if you could create a tool that makes making these videos easy, it'd
provide single-user utility, is important for platforms. See
[http://platformed.info/](http://platformed.info/)

------
frankpinto
A site where you sign up for coffee / tea / lunch with a stranger in your
workplaces area.

Context:

\- I'm currently in Guatemala City and nobody talks here. A lot of people go
to their office, bring their lunch, go home. You hang out with your high
school / college buddies some evenings / weekends. I should know who works in
the building next to mine.

\- Haven't read the book but the concept of "Never Eat Alone" has been running
through my head for a bit

\- [http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/6-habits-
connectors.html?cid...](http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/6-habits-
connectors.html?cid=sf01001)

Inspiration:

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

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

~~~
alejoriveralara
Si!

~~~
frankpinto
Alejo! Forgot to tag you even though I was going to ask you to do the design
haha

~~~
alejoriveralara
Would love to. Definitely!

------
sakai
A simple service for setting up and running jobs/workers without having to run
a server.

Ideally, it would have the following features:

* Pay once, run forever (pay for the job up front and never again -- no recurring billing to worry about)

* Configure once, run forever (use Docker/LXC in the background to allow custom environments and absolve the user of the dependency headaches that can arise when running multiple jobs on a single machine)

* Easy to use

I've been casually working on this as it's a pain point I've experienced
numerous times (e.g., running a daily job that should cost ~50 cents per
month, which is substantially below any available VM price).

Would anybody use this? Other thoughts?

~~~
olegp
This is the only service in this space I could find:
[https://starthq.com/apps/crondash](https://starthq.com/apps/crondash)

It doesn't actually run the job but could be used to trigger them.

I think the idea could work if you could write the tasks as snippets of JS,
think IFTT/Zapier but with a code editor.

~~~
sakai
Yes! Well said.

It would definitely need to include:

* Web code editor for jobs (JS, Python, Ruby, Perl, Go, etc., etc.)

* Results served over an authenticated API (e.g., servicename.com/api/<username>/<jobname>/files/result.csv would get you the latest result.csv file generated by your script, .../<jobname>/20140419/files/result.csv would get you yesterday's, etc.)

* Jobs could probably be both scheduled (i.e., cron-like) or triggered via a webhook

~~~
olegp
Might make sense to stick with JS to start with for the sake of simplicity.

I actually wrote a Node.js PaaS that I never open sourced & periodic short
lived jobs was one of my use-cases.

Let's continue via email.

~~~
notduncansmith
Hey guys, too late to get in on this discussion? Sounds really cool and
something I could see myself using a lot.

hello at duncanmsmith.com

------
vishaldpatel
Here's one I've had for a little while: Say you're playing a sport with your
friends. You're yelling at each other.. commands likes, "pass the ball here".
Or if you're out playing paintball and trying to coordinate an attack - your
sound, and your opponent's sound are both pretty important.

As far as I know, such use of voice does not exist in any game. Player's voice
does not really interact with the environment. So, say someone says, "come to
me!" through voice-chat.. you still have to look at the map to see where they
actually are.

~~~
radikalus
Dolby Axon had something similar-ish:

You and others on voice chat were in a 'virtual' room and the sound was
stereo/volume adjusted accordingly.

I remember that when people misbehaved on group voice chat we used to "put
them in the corner"

It didn't map to the game environment but the execution was pretty nice; I
fear that, if you use the game's physics, you'll quickly realize why radio-
comm became such a thing

~~~
vishaldpatel
Yes for sure.. but one would have to be close to the enemy player and then
he'd be dead. And ally players.. well.. maybe there can be a way to mute
allies ;).

------
gamegoblin
I really hate the format of arguments/debates in person. I feel like they
would be a lot more rational if done through email or something, where one
isn't expected to respond immediately as part of a conversation.

I'd like a website which facilitated debates, allowed debaters to branch off
multiple threads of debate and close threads once they are settled (ideally
until all threads are closed), backreference other threads, citation lists
that get automatically aggregated, etc.

~~~
splike
Its not much good, but what you're describing sounds like
[http://www.debate.org/](http://www.debate.org/)

------
nashadelic
A knowledge assimilator: it crawls the web and other knowledge sources and
summarizes facts about any topic. The system is thus able to auto-generate a
wikipedia-like page for the topic.

If employed in an corporate/enterprise environment, it reads all the
documentation and then someone can ask it questions like: "What does the SDP
5.1 do?", "What is the capacity of an SDP 5.1?", "Can I connect an SDP to an
SCP" etc.

~~~
lesterbuck
IBM Watson can do most of that today, in specific fields like medicine, and is
growing into a general purpose learning and deep Q&A system.

------
refrigerator
[X-post from the previous Idea Sunday thread that didn't make it to the front
page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132)]

Idea: a new way to purchase and set up a fish tank. Currently, you have two
options:

a) Buy everything separately - tank, filter, heater, plants, fish. You have to
find out whether your fish and plants are compatible and your tank is big
enough for what you want etc. You have to figure out where to put the heater
and filter so that it doesn't look unsightly.

b) Buy a prebuilt tank with the filter and heater etc. pre-installed somewhere
not too ugly. You still have to figure out which livestock you can keep, based
on tank size, filter type, plants, and whether they can live with the other
livestock you want. You also have to live with the prebuilt tank company's
design decisions, which you might not like.

The solution: a company that offers minimalistic, sleek tanks with a modular
system for adding filters, heaters, skimmers, lighting, etc. that keeps the
equipment out of the way and not looking ugly. Also, an online service where
they can select and order the modular tank and equipment that they want, and
be allowed to choose from compatible livestock and plants. Alternatively, they
can start with livestock that they want and they can be recommended the right
modular tank and equipment etc. They can pay for everything all together and
the items would be delivered as they are needed (with marine tanks, for
example, you have to let the tank 'cycle' for a few weeks so that the water
parameters normalise before you can add livestock).

What do you guys think?

~~~
keehun
Is the market size worth it? How will you reach the every-day regular-John-
Smith families who aren't going to be keeping an eye out for a service like
this?

~~~
refrigerator
I think there's definitely a market for it. Before people go out and buy fish,
they usually do some research first on what it will entail, so if this site
can also become a really good source of fishkeeping info and shows up on page
1 when people search for something like 'fishkeeping' or 'fish tanks' then
that could be good

~~~
keehun
I guess I'm not totally aware of who the "they" are in "they usually do some
research first" because I feel like a significant chunk of fish purchases come
from parents of little children who are already sleep deprived and go to the
nearest pet store or (God forbid,) Walmart or any other shop where they know
there are fish.

If you're correct that "they usually" actually do research beforehand, there
would probably be a market big enough to sustain a small online business.

------
joeclark77
Crowdsourced gardening. You create an account, taking pictures of your garden.
A cloud service stitches them together into a 3D model. GPS location and the
height of the various house/trees/walls are used to predict sunlight and
shade. Historical weather is recorded and predictions of future weather are
built in. Optionally the user can use cheap sensors or manual test kits to
measure soil contents, moisture, acidity etc.

Once the data is put in, the garden becomes part of the user's "profile" on
the site. Others can examine it and make suggestions about what to plant, how
to amend the soil, etc. User can log the things they do and upload photos (or
use automated sensors and webcam to send periodic updates). You can "star"
someone's garden to keep track of it and see how well their decisions worked.

Would be a great tool for experienced gardeners with too much time on their
hands, and busy newbies (who are nerds like me) to get free access to
distributed knowledge to learn how to grow food in the back yard.

------
Lambdanaut
Let's take 3D printing to the circuit board world.

A consumer machine that can be configured to takes as inputs:

1\. A set of different electrical part. (Perhaps self-contained in a large box
like printer ink is)

2\. A circuit board schematic file

The machine cuts the board and solders the parts in.

And there you have it! Your own computer factory! (For limited definitions of
"computer")

If this idea ever piques anyone's interest, I'd love to lend a hand with it.

~~~
hershel
[http://tempoautomation.com/](http://tempoautomation.com/) is working on a
solution for the pick and place part. Maybe they know of solutions to the
other parts.

------
maxerickson
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582482)

~~~
gus_massa
(Note: This is a comment of dang about the “Idea Sunday” posts in the last
Sunday thread.)

------
fiatjaf
A platform for building websites with data you already have (or will
create/update) and want to make public.

There are already a specialized niche for this: blogs. Blog platforms just
take your data (posts) and display in a nice time-aware format.

But there are not alternatives for pages built with not temporal articles,
tree-structured data, hierarchical content, lists of things etc.

------
jreed91
I just thought of this so I haven't exactly vetted it out yet or checked if
anyone else is doing this.

A major pain I've noticed is event planning. If you are doing it solo you must
call a ton of different individuals. You have to call for a place for the
event, a caterer or someone to supply food, decorations, and finally invite
all the people you want to come.

My idea is kind of a cross between airbnb and eventbrite. We create a service
that works with only local locations and food vendors. This service allows
them to post times they are available and food availability in a central
location. Individuals who are planning an event can come to this web site and
select what they want and where they want there event.

This service acts as the middleman easing the pain of event planning in a one
stop web site and also benefits the local small businesses by connecting them
with people looking for vendors for an event.

Let me know if anyone sees any problems with this or ways it could be
improved.

~~~
notduncansmith
The only problem I see with this is that most people that want to organize an
event on the scale that it would be inconvenient to manage all these things on
their own, would be able to afford an event planner (or they have a staff).

------
ezl
Better calorie counting.

My fitness pal is great, but it too long for me to use, I suck at looking up
or even knowing exactly what I ate is.

What I'd like is an app that lets me just take a picture of my meal, then add
any comments that might be helpful "ham sandwich" or "poached salmon, about
the size of my palm" \-- then it magically figures out what I ate and the
nutrition contents (within a day is fine)

I've seen this attempted before, but nobody still seems to be in business. I
suspect this has to happen with a human powered "pictures+comments to
nutrition data" engine.

I'd be willing to pay $30/mo (too low? $50?) for this and commit to paying for
4 months. If 99 other people (or 59) people committed as well, that'd be
$3000/mo revenue for the day this thing launches.

1\. Would anyone else back that as a pre-signed up user? 2\. Is anyone willing
to do it for us?

~~~
oevi
this already exists: [http://mealsnap.com/](http://mealsnap.com/)

------
X4
OK, you got me in.

I've got a Software Architecture assignment which allows me to work on any
kind of large scale Project (regardless of number of languages and complexity)
for 3 Months. The end result will be planned, discussed and evaluated
scientifically. We're two experienced devs. Suggestions for ideas are welcome!

------
realrocker
A mobile app to gamify recruitment. Users can win small amounts of credit by
1) referring friends(from phonebook) for a job 2) reviewing jobs to put them
in the baskets of: not applicable, interested but not actively looking,
interested and applying.This credit can be redeemed for non-cash items like:
gift cards and coupons. Recruiters pay a fee(in-app payment) to post jobs. In
return they get: 1) leads to candidates who applied and 2) profile summary of
people who found the job interesting but did not apply or found it not
applicable. For e.g: 10 applied(list of contact info), 15 found the job
interesting but did not apply(of which: 70 % are web developers, 60 % have
salaries more than 100k, 80 % are more than 5 years of exp. I have been
working on a prototype but it still need to iron out a few wrinkles idea-wise.

------
Ryel
Full text search of Youtube videos.

How many times have you watched a video, maybe an hour long conference and
wanted to go back to a point in the video where something specific was
mentioned. You have to skim to the area where you think it happened, and then
re-watch the video until you find what you're looking for. That sucks.

Even if Youtube allowed people to embed the full transcript of a video in some
kind of search layer with corresponding points in the video that would be a
dream.

Besides that I'd like a web browser built on 'the hive' that eliminates
advertising. If you want to browse the web without being tracked, traced,
prodded and harassed you could install the browser and a small, unnoticeable
amount of your CPU is used to help power the hive. I would then like to see
that operating system give a charitable donation every 6 months that says they
will donate 1 month of computational power to a research organization.

One thing I've always wanted to create is a competition website like Kaggle
but with real world results. Let's say I create this and go to Mount Sinai
hospital in NYC and tell them that I want to run a contest. The contest is to
anybody who thinks they can increase Mount Sinai's margins by X percentage
within a particular area of interest. The agreement with Mount Sinai is that
they have to give us all of the available data and we will open-source it. The
challenge for open-source folks is to review the data and if you can find a
way to increase margins by X percentage while still upholding the same level
of quality, you win the prize. Let's say Mount Sinai gives us access to the
entire spreadsheet of products they order from hospital gowns to radiation
machines, or even lets say we fund a $100,000 bounty to anybody or any team
who can reduce their emergency room wait times by 50%.

You could solve the problem in any way possible, improving hardware/software,
or simply finding redundancy in logistics.

Hospitals are probably not the best examples but I hope you see what I'm
getting at...

------
hershel
1\. Combining the mio water flavoring , which gets very good reviews in his
category ,into a cap of a reusable water bottle ,similar to pillid[2]

2\. Pcb layout design, in the electronics industry, is somewhat similar to
games like pipes. So why not gamify pcb layout[3] ?

3\. Recently i read some interesting research about some electronic circuit.
It would have been very useful to get access to a full diagram/layout and a
module to buy and play with.

[2][http://store.nalgene.com/product-p/pillid.htm](http://store.nalgene.com/product-p/pillid.htm)

[3][http://www.chipestimate.com/blogs/IPInsider/?p=2126](http://www.chipestimate.com/blogs/IPInsider/?p=2126)

~~~
meigwilym
UK drinks manufacturer Robinson's have just released Squash'd[1], similar to
your first idea

[1][http://www.robinsonssquashd.co.uk/](http://www.robinsonssquashd.co.uk/)

~~~
hershel
Mio does look similar. the whole point is make it easier to carry it inside
the bottle - less hassle, less forgetting, less things to carry.

Even better would be integration inside the reusable bottle cap such as you
just press somewhere to flavor a bottle.

------
caseyash2
As a part of my venture into user interface and user experience design
([http://www.caseyash.com](http://www.caseyash.com)), I created a few
concepts. It would be excellent if I could implement them, however technical
individuals are rare in Tennessee.

Below are the concepts:

Pack - A travel planning tool that integrates weather information to stay
alert on what to pack.

RQRES - A real estate search that uses a collaborative algorithm to quickly
find a home. The application pulls 10 homes; user rates them and then are
shown results that are highly relevant.

Pattern - A more difficult game of Simon. Instead of four tiles, there are
nine. The game also features ways to manipulate the game board.

Wonder - Hyper-local network.

------
brightsunday
Bufferbox Duplex - I sometimes find myself wanting to transfer a physical
product (books, keys to bikes etc) with someone. Sometimes it is hard
coordinating this and I often wish I could just put it into a box from which
only they could come and pick it up.

If people are familiar with Bufferbox (YC S12,acquired by Google) this is
essentially the duplex version. People can deposit and retrieve
packages/items.

One can think of charging people for the amount of time the package remains
inside the system or based on the size of the box etc.

Pros - if there is a secure payment system on top of this, one can essentially
use this to implement a small marketplace.

Cons - Could be used for exchanging illegal goods as well.

------
mudil
WP plugin to charge for guest posts.

As a blogger for last 10 years, I think someone should consider providing WP
blogs with ability to charge for guest posts. That can be done either as a
single time purchase (for a single guest post) or as a recurring payment (i.e.
monthly charge for unlimited or predetermined number of guest posts per
month). The purchaser makes a payment and opens an account, and then is
redirected to WP where he can write a post.

Guests posts is a growing industry for a number of reasons: SEO manipulation,
old fashioned PR, promotional activities, contests with multiple participants
(such as writing contests), etc etc.

~~~
conroy
Matt Cutts has said recently[0] that guest blogging should be avoided.

[0]: [http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-
blogging/](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/)

~~~
notduncansmith
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I feel like it's
relevant to the discussion (and was about to post it myself).

~~~
dang
Comments like the GP have been affected by the recent change we made to make
some downvotes more powerful (cf. sama's recent post on this). We did this to
address HN's toxic comments problem, but it has a downside: some good comments
get caught in the crossfire. It's not that they're getting more downvotes than
before, it's that you see it more because they're getting counted more.

The HN community has long had an informal self-correcting mechanism for this
case: when fair-minded users see a substantive and civil comment unfairly
faded out, they upvote it back to par. We're encouraging everybody to do this
consciously. The hope is that the overwhelming majority of good comments will
come to rest in positive territory, while comments that deserve it stay
negative. Exactly this happened with the GP.

In general, it's best to give such comments a corrective upvote yourself and
trust your fellow users to do the same. "Why was this downvoted" posts mostly
add noise—especially once the comment in question is back at par. (We're
seeing a lot of this.) If it turns out that it's necessary to rally corrective
upvotes—that is, if casual reader attention isn't enough—we'll figure out an
unobtrusive way to achieve that. For now, though, let's wait and see if it is.

------
slater
A sortable, queryable list of movies. A site that would retrieve a resulting
(and sortable!) list of queries such as "Show me all science-fiction movies
made in the last ten years", or "All Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that have
won an Oscar" (trick question!)

\- Yes, IMDB exists. And has some of the functionality I'd like. But it is a
slow site, replete with ads, upsells, 2003-esque "only show 10 results per
page!", etc. Yes, I realize they have to make money.

\- Yes, there are millions of movies in existence, and thousands added to the
pile every year. Not sure how to fix that data issue :(

~~~
miguelrochefort
Take a look at Wolfram Alpha:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Movies.html](http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Movies.html)

------
Jemaclus
Google Glass app that streams subtitles from Netflix, Hulu, or even cable TV.
I rely heavily on subtitles to watch TV (I'm very hard-of-hearing), but I've
found that my [hearing] friends don't like subtitles very much. It would make
my life 10 million times easier if I could watch TV with subtitles or closed
captioning without having to subject my friends to that as well.

I don't know jack shit about Google Glass, but this is so high on my list of
wants that I'd drop $1500 for a Google Glass just for this app, assuming it
worked well and as advertised.

Someone make this happen.

~~~
karangoeluw
I remember an app demo in my last hackathon: when reading the Bible in hebrew,
English translation appeared on Glass.

Your idea isn't hard to work on, but I don't have a glass to do it.

~~~
AustinDizzy
The app you're talking about is Word Lens:
[http://questvisual.com/us/](http://questvisual.com/us/).

~~~
karangoeluw
Nope. It was an app for glass.

------
bliker
I really want a nice wysiwyg markdown editor. Not the two column layout. I
want syntax highlighting, but it should not only do colors but also semantics.
Headings should be actually bigger and italics slanted.

I tried and failed to make this idea a reality. I got to partial solution
using regular expressions. But it is far from functional and reliable but it
is only like 200 lines!

You can check it out here:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52646091/syntax/selectio...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52646091/syntax/selection.html)

~~~
quaunaut
Have you ever checked out [Mou]([http://mouapp.com/](http://mouapp.com/))?

You can turn off the live preview and it does exactly what you're asking.
Just, it's not in-browser.

------
cweiss
A photo app designed specifically for concerts - The main feature is that the
display goes dark while filming/snapping shots. As someone who goes to a lot
of shows, I hate the myriad of tiny squares I see between myself and the stage
and I've noticed a fairly small percentage of folks actually check focus/etc.,
they just stick their phones in the air and shoot away.

Bonus points for good social media integration - Read my location/4sq to know
what show I'm at - Easy posting to 4sq/FB/Twitter/Compuserve.

~~~
vishaldpatel
Seems like a thankless sacrifice to use a photo app that will take pictures at
a concert in a way that doesn't annoy others. How would you market this?

~~~
cweiss
A mix of "Dont be this guy" ad messaging and emphasis on the social sharing
side similar to Vine. Auto-sharing (or at least auto-queue for sharing) so
you're also not 'texting' in the middle of the show right after you get the
shot.

To be honest, I'd love to see it added as a feature in an existing successful
photo app.

------
kordless
A highly distributed framework for building a coop cloud using OpenStack and
Bitcoin: [https://github.com/StackMonkey](https://github.com/StackMonkey).
Whitepaper here: [https://github.com/StackMonkey/xovio-
pool/blob/master/whitep...](https://github.com/StackMonkey/xovio-
pool/blob/master/whitepaper.md)

I'm working on this full time now, so it's less of an idea than a reality in
progress! :)

------
cabalamat
Something like Wordpress but including a wiki as well as a group blog. The
blog entries would also be viewable based on recentness/score (like on reddit
or HN) or by topic (like on forum software).

It would be possible to have a local mirror of the site on one's PC which
would automatically sync with the live site; this mirror could also be used to
set up other live sites. Thgis would be an anti-censorship measure if the site
went down, someonre else could mirror it easily.

~~~
poppingtonic
Look at the blog lesswrong.com. It's a community blog built from reddit's
code. It has a wiki as well.

[https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong‎](https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong‎)

~~~
cabalamat
Thnaks. Here's the correct URL btw:
[https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong](https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong)

------
rokhayakebe
Endorse Graph: A browser plugin that allows people who are signed in with
their Linkedin, Github, Stack Overflow, Medical-Sites, etc... to endorse the
content of a web page.

------
iamsalman
Searchable photo albums OR Google Image search for personal photos.

Basically a way to organize photos into searchable tags which are context
aware and auto-generated. This way, I will not have to browse through tons of
photos to find the ones shot at a concert, for example. What if I simply
search for "concert" and all my photos shot at some concert are fetched. The
key here is to auto-tag the photos as good (or near to) as Google does with
their Image search.

------
ld00d
A system of homeless charity. I never have cash. What if I could scan a QR
code to donate? What if that donation was better distributed through a central
agency instead of directly to the person on the street corner? The guy on the
corner gets a bigger piece as an incentive.

A distributed peer to peer encrypted chat system. No dependencies on Google or
whoever for hosting. No middle channel holding private keys. Threaded
conversations. Synced across devices.

~~~
spaboleo
Regarding the first topic: Check out Handup
([https://handup.us/](https://handup.us/)) – It's not exactly what you
described, but they are kind of a middle man between the homeless, charities
and you as a potential donator.

I dig the peer 2 peer chat.

------
coinspotting
You can look at Firespotting - it is a hacker news for ideas.

------
elemos
A safe storage locker. I travel frequently for work between a few different
cities and it's a pain to constantly have to pack and re-pack, and buy and re-
buy those things which I cannot pack.

I just want a locker where I can feel safe leaving my stuff in the cities that
I travel to most frequently. This means I'm reasonably assured they wont get
stolen as well as being afforded many of the same rights when you own or rent
property.

~~~
siruva07
The physical dropbox. That's what we're building at www.makespace.com.

What cities are you in?

------
notduncansmith
One idea I saw posted last week that I'm scoping out and considering working
on: Dataclips for everyone.

Heroku Dataclips allow you to share the results of a SQL query against your
database with a simple URL. It'd be really cool as a standalone service that
you could hook up to your non-Heroku DBs (local, QA, production, etc). An API
would be sweet as well (imagine having a dataclip with your stack traces
during QA).

~~~
BjoernKW
I'm working on this right now. If you're interested shoot me a message.

------
yesimahuman
Registered agents as a service. Right now hiring people out of state is a
pain, despite how popular remote working is getting. There are a lot of random
rules in each state, and you have to have a registered agent in a state in
order to hire in that one. There are a few services that do this, but they do
it poorly and not in the typical startup fashion we've come to expect.

------
sarvagyavaish
Travel Assistant While travelling I like to keep family and friends involved
up to date about my travel plans - itinerary changes, delayed flights, boarded
flight, landed flight, etc. Instead of a pushing updates by texting 3-4
different people, I want to be able to provide an update in one place, say, on
the Travel Assistant app, and my family can receive appropriate updates.

~~~
spaboleo
Doesn't www.tripit.com do exactly this?

~~~
Nicholas_C
Can you notify other people of the status of your trip automatically though?
I've used TripCase in the past and they don't have this feature that I'm aware
of.

------
vecio
A specific place to share and watch how other developers or designers work on
their projects, by live screen sharing. It should be a good place to learn
from real projects development.

I came across this idea after YC said no to my Android screen live sharing
service [https://shou.tv](https://shou.tv), a live video streaming service for
Android gamers.

------
MicroBerto
This might exist but Googling for it has been a wasteland.

I follow many social media feeds that are other companies in my industry -
some partners, some competitors.

I want a script or app or service to dig through their social media history
(pics, posts, etc) and send me what's been most engaging.

That's it. Can probably be done in iMacros, just haven't found the time...
Could be a small SAAS though.

------
dk8996
Social analytics. The idea is that you can keep track of multiple facebook fan
pages/twitter accounts and see how they grow over time. How many followers
overtime, how many links, ect.. You may want to see other info like from what
countries the likes, follows are from. Something very simple that just keeps
track of your analytics and displays a nice chart.

------
curlyreggie
This might be trivial. One of my friends is a serious blogger (she has around
7-8 blog sites on various topics she writes). Why not a simple blog aggregator
to post in blogs into the site you wish?

E.g., You want to blog for tumblr, create a post here and then it gets auto-
posted to tumblr directly.

Of course, the API issues and permissions are another headache to worry about.

------
wmaiouiru
A cloud processing platform that would automatically edit videos for users
based on algorithms. My thesis is that users will take more and more videos
but the tools to edit them (adobe premiere, youtube editor etc) are too much
hassle for people. The first market segment would be goPro and google glass
users. Thoughts?

------
zealon
Ok, here is mine: Prototyper. \- Create a webapp that allows the users to
choose their phone model. \- Based on that, generate and allow downloading of
a custom app (Android, iOS) for that model. \- The user should be able to
customize the software modules for that app and interconnect them, IFTTT-like.

HTH ;-)

------
miguelrochefort
Semantic product review. Object-oriented product review if you will.

Refer to specific aspects of a product and make semantic statements about
them.

Endorse what you agree with instead of repeating it.

Basically, no blank text box waiting to be filled witohut the reviewer's own
unique way to format thoughts.

------
fiatjaf
A tool for storing/sharing information inside private communities.

Enough of the forum/blog/posts/email solutions! How can a community of people,
oriented to a subject or location, keep organized data about things it cares
about?

------
dmacedo
Github for databases. I've been brainstorming occasionally about this idea...
:)

~~~
joeclark77
Database version-control is IMHO going to be very important in the near
future. I'd encourage you to go ahead with it!

~~~
dmacedo
Definitely!

So far gathered thoughts on this, documented some business and sustainability
plans (some awesome ideas here), and planning a medium-term timeline to
actually work on.

But this is very complex to handle on my own, and only in my spare time!

~~~
joeclark77
Have you thought about a database to target? I know there are 3rd party tools
for SQL Server version control, but haven't been exposed to any for
PostgreSQL, which is becoming my database of choice.

~~~
dmacedo
I have a number of them to target, part of the business plan is to cover
several (very interesting) use cases, along with creating a shared workflow
for these. So while some relational databases will be covered, so will other
types.

Also note I'm interested in focusing open source databases first, if not only!

------
mukeshsoni
A site which keeps track of which of these 'Idea Sunday' ideas actually got
implemented and how are they doing 1 year, 2 years, 5 years or 10 years later.
Will give empirical data only how powerful are ideas.

~~~
hackerpolicy
How would you keep track of the ideas that have been implemented/are being
worked on? User-submitted?

~~~
mukeshsoni
I think it needs to be a mix of user submitted entries (company name which
implemented the idea) and automated tracking there after.

------
hiis
1) daily email that highlights the top 10 posts on HN (by points or by most
comments)

2) simple way to share sensitive financial details with others (e.g., credit
card payments, pay stubs, paypal history, bank transactions)

~~~
notduncansmith
1) [http://www.hackernewsletter.com/](http://www.hackernewsletter.com/) 2)
Seems like there are tons of messaging apps that claim to be secure. Mark
Cuban recommends Cyber Dust: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyber-dust-
disappearing-chat...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyber-dust-disappearing-
chat/id690158616?mt=8) (not encrypted AFAIK but transient). There's also
Telegram (though I think there's some drama around them from a competition
they ran earlier this year) for secure messaging, and Google Docs.

------
rdl
Free network (data, voice, mobile) monitoring in exchange for personalized and
general/statistical data based recommendations (which plan to change, which
ISPs in the area are best, etc.)

~~~
spaboleo
Yeah it is a total hassle to research that and don't get screwed. One can
basically spend days researching on that topic and in the end you'll still
feel like you made the wrong decision.

The problem with this is that you (as a customer) mostly are locked down by...
a) a long-term commitment (2 year contract) b) the process of changing is made
so complicated (30 day grace period, waiting for technicians)

All that makes it hard for the customer to adapt to the ever so fast changing
market.

The only way I see is to virtualize this. So that you would no longer be a
customer of cellular provider X and internet service provider Y, but you'd be
a fixed-fee customer of Z-ALL. The company Z-All then acts as a customer for
provider X and Y.

It would be interesting nevertheless!

------
DanBC
It would perhaps be better if only one person posted these threads.

------
bnchrch
Hey, I created a little meteor app today just for this.
[http://thoughts.meteor.com/](http://thoughts.meteor.com/)

~~~
cheepin
.. and here comes the spam

------
shanacarp
A peer to peer mortgage marketplace.

Basically, qualified investors own pieces of mortgage in their communities.

I've seen variations of this for student loans - why not mortgages?

~~~
akg_67
Realty Mogul [https://www.realtymogul.com](https://www.realtymogul.com) Real-
estate Crowdfunding.

------
JacobJans
A twist on a simple timer / productivity app.

When you want to focus, instead of pressing start, you ask for time from
someone else.

Once you've completed using that time, you get to pass it on to somebody else.

Completion depends on approval from the previous owner of the time.

As the time gets used, it gets passed from person to person, creating a "time
chain." Participants get to see the history of the time chain. Established
users can create new time chains and watch them grow.

------
ape4
zipcar/uber: A service that delivers a car you drive to where you are when you
want it. Maybe you call up an hour before or via an app. And/or the opposite:
you have driven somewhere can don't want the car anymore - eg drinking.

~~~
endeavour
Taxi?

~~~
ape4
Taxis are great for some situations but not others. 1. Say you are working
late (the train service has closed) and know you'll leave in the next 3 hours.
Order a car to be delivered to your parking lot and just get into it whenever
your finish work. 2. How about the dreaded: other people offering you a ride
since you don't have a car. You would be very happy to take a taxi but they
insist. No problem; order up a car and its waiting for you when you leave the
meeting and nobody will have to take "help you out".

------
hackerpolicy
Waze but for supermarket prices.

~~~
arb99
I think Waze gets its data from other users, but in the uk we have
[https://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/](https://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/) which
will tell you the cheapest online grocery shopping company to go with for your
selected 'trolly' (basket). (it compares tesco, sainsbury's, asda etc)

------
miguelrochefort
Semantic version of Twitter.

Every tweet is RDF.

~~~
perlgeek
I'm actually working on something like this, though with JSON instead of RDF.
Drop me a line (moritz@faui2k3.org) if you're interested.

------
philip1209
An app that shares the password of local wifi - e.g. for the coffee shop you
are sitting in.

Perhaps neither practical nor legal, but something that would be useful when
the barista is feeling snarky and you don't want to return a second time to
ask for the wifi password.

------
hershel
Tools to reduce distraction in doing research on the web.

------
ddorian43
html5+flash video player all in one with reasonable pricing and no revenue-
share for vast/google ads

~~~
vishaldpatel
I used Projekktor. The paid version has VAST support and works quite well:
[http://www.projekktor.com/](http://www.projekktor.com/)

~~~
ddorian43
does vast also work in flash-mode ?

~~~
vishaldpatel
I'm not sure - I made sure that the videos I'm hosting were webm and mp4, and
I've only tested it in html5 browsers.

------
nhebb
A newsletter advertising network.

------
hackaflocka
A Chrome plugin for Hacker News and Reddit that does only one thing: collapse
all comments to top level comments.

