

The Hacker News Experiment - roschdal
http://hackernewsexperiment.blogspot.com

======
thetrumanshow
Neat. Even better if there was a Hacker News Startup Challenge, similar to
Rails Rumble, where instead of mere 48-hours, you work for 1-2 months and
launch, then you get reviewed by a panel of judges. This would be much more
interesting to me, I guess.

It would be awesome if the winner would get a free ticket to fly to the Valley
and join the current YCombinator class for one of their famous dinners, and
get to present.

Wishful thinking, maybe.

~~~
DavidMcLaughlin
This would be really interesting, especially for those of us who are
struggling to meet that special someone (i.e. a co-founder). For me at least,
I think being part of a competition and having external interest to keep
motivation up would be helpful.

~~~
alain94040
_meet that special someone (i.e. a co-founder)_

Two words for you:

1) the co-founders meetup <http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/>

2) instead of lamenting about a situation, do something about it
[http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/06/10/will-you-be-a-
great-...](http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/06/10/will-you-be-a-great-
entrepreneur-how-i-can-tell-from-your-resume/) "entrepreneurs are the ones who
do when everyone else is talking"

Literally, if you don't like something, fix it. Just do it yourself. Don't cry
on HN that something needs to be done. To me, that's a tell-tale sign of
entrepreneurs.

~~~
rjett
"Don't cry on HN that something needs to be done."

I read nothing in that comment that sounded like crying.

As to your first suggestion about the Co-Founder-Wanted-Meetup: Am I such a
cheapskate that $65 in advance/ $125 at the door to attend a meetup sounds a
bit steep? Perhaps I can't see the forest for the trees and the opportunity
cost of missing a meetup like this is way greater than the attendance fee. So
for anyone who has attended this meetup, is it worth the fee?

~~~
alain94040
Sorry, you confused the regular co-founders meetup (price between $6 and $10
to get in), with the founder conference, a once-a-year event. Different size,
different price.

The crying part: I was trying to anticipate the reaction of "but there is no
such meetup where I live". Just do it.

------
samaparicio
How about this? Build a general purpose "backend" interface that allows
anybody trying to commercialize a web product to manage their users.

Your system should allow:

* the creation of superadmin accounts

* Map your user model to my user model

* CRUD users of my application

* Impersonate users of my application so I can see their data

* Expire / suspend / upgrade / downgrade users

* Search for users

* Notify a user via email of something

* Report top users by metric (in the mapping operation above we tell you where to look up these metrics)

* Report new signups per day

~~~
myoung8
There are various Rails plugins that take care of most of this stuff. I've had
great success with restful_authentication
(<http://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication>)

~~~
steveklabnik
You should check out AuthLogic. restful-auth's generator based approach is
awkward sometimes, and it hasn't been updated in forever...

~~~
SingAlong
Devise has been my choice in recent times. but beware it has no roles. it's
simple and bakes in everything though. so in 2 commands in the terminal you'll
see a login system in your browser including forgot password feature that
authlogic doesn't give you.

Making all of those features Samparicio said would be a little tough for code
reuse. Engines feature was planned for Rails 3.0 beta but pushed to 3.x.
That's the feature that can help code reuse. But it's possible to do this
neatly on Django, which allows component-based architecture for apps.

~~~
steveklabnik
Authlogic has no roles either, I use acl9.

Authlogic and forgotten passwords is pretty simple, though. It sort of gives
it to you. Well, it gives you the tools. It's really only a tiny bit of
coding.

I'll certainly check out Devise though.

------
lvecsey
How about a 4chan style message board in the sense that posts expire very
rapidly, but also in that only single topics are allowed for certain time
intervals. For example the site could start off with a 24 hour cycle in that
dialog can take place on a certain topic (such as BP oil spill) based on the
first message that has come in that day. It'll need some means of aggressively
pruning out (marking as spam) messages that are deemed off topic, but this can
be a voluntary (karma based) or a machine learning approach that could also be
tweaked or plugged in beyond the 4 week development period. The initial
version would just keep topics on lock down for an additional 24 hour period,
before permanent deletion. So basically there is one active topic, and one
previous topic for review.

------
Alex3917
This isn't strictly a web application, but if you are a Java programmer then
one project I'd recommend would be integrating the Twitter Search API with
FreeMind for the purpose of facilitating real time curation of tweets. Real
time curation is apparently the number one request for software that the
twitter people get, and FreeMind is the ideal platform for curating tweets.
All that's needed is a way to intelligently get tweets into FreeMind so that
they can be quickly sorted appropriate buckets, and since FreeMind is written
in Java it might be a good fit in terms of skill set and project size.

To give an example of how this would be used, the project described above
would reduce the time of making this from about seven hours to about an hour:
<http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education>

Also, here are two relevant blog posts:

[http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-
tim...](http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-
curators/)

[http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-
me-a...](http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-me-an-idea-
for-a-simple-web-service/)

~~~
chc
Wouldn't this require Twitter to give you direct access to the firehose?

~~~
Titanous
No, there's a streaming API [0] that allows for access to a subset of the
firehose in JSON via search and filtering. I wrote a short ruby script that is
a good demo of how it works [1].

0 <http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation>

1 <http://gist.github.com/325757>

------
10ren
As someone who's been skimming "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", I note that
your schedule is purely Product Development - there's no Customer Development.
Since YC is about "building something _people want_ ", that second part is
equally crucial. Arguably more so.

My take on "4 steps" is: do iterative/agile/RAD/MythicalManMonth development
(you present a demo ASAP, so the client can tell if that's what they want or
not), but to _not wait til you have a demo_. You iterate on "the customer
problem you're solving" and "specs of the product". This is much faster than
building a demo, which is faster again than building the whole thing - and
only _then_ finding out that the "people want" part is missing. (You build the
product concurrently).

What you're proposing is an engineering project - which is great! Nothing
wrong with that, challenging, lots of fun, lots of learning. Just noting it's
focussed entirely on that half of an _entrepreneurial_ project - a common
developer approach.

------
mmaunder
Are you building a business or a piece of software? It sounds like you're
building a piece of software which is totally cool - I just want some clarity
before I contribute.

~~~
roschdal
I first and foremost want to solve a real problem for someone. To do this I
think that I should develop a web application which solves this problem. If
solving this problem also requires a business, then that is something that I
would consider. Andreas

------
Joeboy
Here is what I would like to see.

The Freecycle Network is brilliant - lots of stuff gets rehomed that would
otherwise get dumped in landfills. People get their redundant stuff taken
away, people get free stuff (computers, toasters, clothes...), it's good for
the environment, it's all good. Technically speaking, it's in the dark ages
though. It runs via mailing lists, which are operated by Yahoo and apply to
discrete geographical areas. It works well enough, but I think it could be
improved on, or at least supplemented.

I would like to see a system based around open standards. I envisage:

* A structured way of listing spare stuff - ie. hListing or some variant.

* A way of managing a network of people whose stuff you're interested in - Portable Contacts? Whatever the state of the art is, not sure. Ideally something that can be somewhat integrated with people's existing social network info. Or, screw it, just a list would do for now.

* A standard way of managing who can see your listings - OAuth?

* A web application that you can use to manage your listings (or in time any number of applications, since the end result is standards-based output)

* A web application that aggregates, filters, searches and displays other people's listings (these last two bullet points are probably functions of the same application)

This is a bit sketchy but If it's feasible, I think such a system has a number
of advantages over Freecycle or the various balkanized web-based databases of
free stuff. I vaguely intend to look into doing this myself at some point, but
I'm hoping if I pimp the idea about a bit somebody else will do it for me (or
with me).

------
paraschopra
I think it was suggested by someone else here on HN but the idea is to have a
widget on blog that tracks how many pages a visitor has browsed. Then simply
show him a message saying 'Hey, you seem to be a loyal reader. This is your
3rd visit on the blog and you have read 33 blog posts here. Writing unique
content takes time and effort, so please consider leaving a small tip to
encourage me to write even more.'

Also show some sort of leader board of donators and the content they consume.
Idea is to come up with guilt-ware which presents a new revenue stream for
dedicated bloggers :)

------
openfly
Regarding the use of Java, the language is dying. Maybe the languages
developer base, and supporters refuse to believe it, but on the commercial end
most of the major Java supporting software shops have wound down or died. Even
sun is closing up development. So, if you are developing actively in Java you
run the very real risk of developing a ton of unmaintainable code.

It's like the quiet little joke the industry refuses to address. Erstwhile,
Google is now the only people doing any legitimate active development on a new
vm... and even they aren't chaining themselves to Java.

So I ask you, do you really want your software written in a dying language? I
wouldn't. Java apps were hard enough to support when the many and myriad vms
were being actively worked on. I can't imagine the pain that will be brought
down upon adopters now. =/

~~~
aagha
Really? -
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

------
fegu
Web-based MMS message composer. Initial features:

0) Subject and Text 1) add image (gif,jpg,png) 2) add support for more than 1
image 3) add resizing tool for images 4) add support for other filetypes (no
preview necessary - just add as attachments) 5) Add support for page breaks
(separate pages) 6) Simple design choices (text and image together on page or
on separate pages etc) 7) More advanced design choices (move content between
pages)

The output should be zipfile (one file per image, one file for text, one file
for design - SMIL language). If you want to be advanced then you can also
output Nokia MMS file format.

I have written some C#-code for reading Nokia MMS file format if you need
that.

I can coach and give feedback if necessary. I am working in the mobile
technology industry as a software developer.

~~~
roschdal
Interesting suggestion. What real problem would this solve for people? Sending
MMS messages is expensive at the moment, so making it cheaper would proably
make it more usable for people. Anything more?

------
Geee
Here's one idea: Take Open Text Summarizer (<http://libots.sourceforge.net/>)
and turn it into a web application which takes in an URL and returns the same
document summarized.

------
nevinera
I love craigslist as an apartment finding tool. Most of the ads for apartments
include a google maps link, so I can figure out if it's really in the area I'm
interested in.

But every time I move I wish constantly for a service that would let me search
craigslist by actual location. My mental picture is a location and distance,
but some kind of region-selection on a google-maps overlay would be even
better.. or a location and a maximum travel time. A feed of those ads as they
are made would be even more powerful.

------
roschdal
Thanks for all the feedback and ideas so far, everyone. I would still like to
challenge you to share more real problems that I could develop a web
application to solve. Andreas

~~~
StudyAnimal
To people here, the ideas themselves are probably more valuable than the
effort required to realize them. It might be a good idea to reach out to
communities that have good ideas, but not the technical means to implement
them. Having said that, check out:

<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> <http://openideas.eu/>
<http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/>

I am reluctant to give you any of my ideas, but how about a web app for
images, that particularly serves the needs of e.g. law enforcement, and allows
storage and annotation related to crime scenes, cases, etc, or perhaps for the
health industry, and does the same for patients with certain conditions, and
you could tag them and other doctors could offer second opinions for money
etc.

------
iamanet
Interesting. I am open if you are considering collaboration which will give
one additional man month to finish the project. I am familiar with C, C++ and
Python.

~~~
roschdal
Hi! This could be possible. Please sende me an email with info about yourself.
Contact info in profile. Andreas

------
yurylifshits
I want inline previews (first paragraph) or the full text for every news, so
that I can read the stories without leaving HN. It can be a GreaseMonkey
script that adds a "show full text" button, and, when you click on it, shows
the full text.

Not sure, what is the legal status of such previews, though...

------
roschdal
Update: I have publised a summary of the progress so far on my blog:

[http://hackernewsexperiment.blogspot.com/2010/06/status-
from...](http://hackernewsexperiment.blogspot.com/2010/06/status-from-
day-1-evaluating-ideas.html)

~~~
what
I saw you're planning on doing something with public transit. You should check
out Google's Transit Program, they have public feeds of transit info (stops,
routes, stop times and what not) here:
[http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFe...](http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds)

------
nhebb
Experiment Track Thyself: Make an experiment tracking database.

------
ddemchuk
Create a micro book summary site. I have the entire thing planned out and will
realistically never get to it as much as I think I could. It's mostly standard
CRUD, with some bells and whistles, you can monetize it pretty well, and I
know of a good domain for you if you want to do it.

I genuinely want you to take my idea, please contact me and I will give you
everything I have.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
I have been thinking about this for a while. Not the app, but the fact that
book summaries would be really useful. Most books tend to be too verbose. Care
to elaborate a little on your idea for the app?

~~~
ddemchuk
Basically take stackoverflow and make it for book summaries, but put a word or
character limit to the summaries. So eventually, you'll have a collection of
the best 500 word book summaries

------
startuprules
How about an open-source hacker news? Thereby destroying the same community
that helped you to create it.

What? He said "the problem must not have been solved before"

~~~
AmberShah
"Thereby destroying the same community that helped you to create it."

Downvoted because it's silly to think that an open source implementation
(regardless of whether there already was one or not) would destroy HN. As if
it hasn't been done a million times before. It's the community, not the
technology.

~~~
joubert
But what if the (community of) hackers can actually modify the system during
runtime, using same techniques as voting stories up/down to write the code?

~~~
Rust
I've already feature-frozen v0.7, but I'm going to look into this as a plugin
for 0.8 - potentially very cool idea.

