
Show HN:  Needed Ideas for things to build, so I built this - drum
http://www.aswhoiwant.com
======
_lex
I like it. To limit spam, use twitter for auth and connect ideas to twitter
profiles, then let people flag other people as spam - and hellban their
account.

If you don't want auth, you can still just let people flag spam and hellban
machines spitting out spam.

Edit: You can also use basic ratelimiting - maybe only allow 1 post per 10
seconds.

~~~
igravious
Just rate limit (one word, two words?) to 1 per 30 (10 seems not enough,
dunno) seconds and not allow more than 3 of the same strings repeated
sequentially.

------
shawabawa3
I tried

    
    
        As a SQL injection, I want a '); DROP TABLE Statements;--
    

And got a 500 error... you might want to look into sanitizing the data

~~~
smaili
Wait you mean you really don't want to drop a table? Liar!!! :)

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adamzerner
Brilliant! I've always had an idea in the back of my mind for a website that
allows people to tell you "what they want". I like how you have the "as a"
part of it, so rather than someone saying "I want this", they say "as a X, I
want this". I think it prompts people to be more concise and clear about what
they want.

But there are some obvious things to address... \- how to deal with
malicious/unserious users \- how to organize the information in such a way
that it's easy for entrepreneurs and "makers" to navigate to problems they'd
like to solve \- make it easy for people to use this on the spur of the
moment. people are best at telling you what they want on the spur of the
moment, rather than having them think back to what there problems were

Some ideas... \- maybe you could do some type of language processing to keep
track of how many times someone said "I want X". (you can't literally match
the characters because there are multiple ways of saying "I want X") \- making
it easy to use on the spur of the moment probably means making a good mobile
version of this. (I don't have a smartphone, so I don't know if you did
already) \- I'm not sure how this would be done, but I've always had the idea
of having some sort of browser add-on where you have a keyboard shortcut for
an "idea bar", so you could just press cmd+i, type in your idea/problem, and
it'd be sent to a database/site like aswhoiwant.com. you could also keep track
of things like what site the idea is coming from, maybe some stuff about the
user etc. this might lead to more serious use. EDIT: I like what _lex1 said
about spam \- I've thought about it a little, and to reduce spam and increase
seriousness, you'd probably have to make it less convenient. maybe don't show
people the streaming list of posts. but it'd be good to show people a list of
their posts along with how many upvotes they got. maybe there should be a list
of posts that you could upvote, updated every hour or so. maybe one list for
popular posts(with most upvotes for day/month/year), and another for new ones.

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jurassic
As much as it saddens me to say this, I think this needs a CAPTCHA to keep the
"hackers" from spamming it to oblivion. Cool idea, though.

~~~
drum
its starting to seem that way.. thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
todd3834
don't captcha just rate limit by ip

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jweese
Everyone's talking about auth to limit spam, but I think a more interesting
approach is to let people click to flag spam, then train up a little naive
Bayes classifier.

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aviswanathan
Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to <http://www.tweetspiration.com/>. After
putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd-
supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?

~~~
drum
i like the comments idea!

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mwulfert
you should add an algorithm to filter out the spam and make an app out of
this. you could change the theme every day, e.g. tomorrow it could be "if I
had [..] I would [..]", etc.

can totally see this taking off

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ComputerGuru
Did you release this anywhere else? I'd be _appalled_ to learn all that foul
language is coming from HN.

EDIT: Very sad. Nothing more to say.

~~~
drum
only on hacker news :)

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doki_pen
I tried testing some XSS stuff and got 500 errors, you might want to make sure
you are catching encoded &lt; &gt; stuff

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zachgersh
Interesting to see the amount of different inputs that people are trying.
Swastikas and attempts to DROP TABLE aplenty.

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hashtree
Is it odd that I find the exercise to prevent the spam far more interesting
than the product itself (not a criticism)? No traditional captchas, no oauth
tie-ins... just good-old-fashion machine learning, graph analysis,
hellbanning, negative captchas, etc

~~~
cadalac
Yeah, looks like a good technique for programmers to gain some experience :
build a hacking magnet and defend it

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ArekDymalski
I guess that it isn't something you intended, but you've build great
entertainment site. As your user I want you to archive these pearls of humour
and let me upvote'em. Time to pivot ;)

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ikonos_de
As a spam-filter to mail I want a spam-filter to aswhoiwant ;)

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npguy
If you need ideas for things to build, you can look at
<http://firespotting.com> \- Hacker News for Ideas.

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swat535
This is pretty fun, I just posted a random want, I dont know where this is
going but it seems promising.

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mindcrime
Not sure this is being used the way you expected / planned, but it's still
pretty cool. :-)

~~~
drum
haha thanks! I can't say I didnt expect some "porn star" style requests

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codereflection
I've just been watching it for about 5 minutes, pretty entertaining actually.

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gosu
My wants are not being acknowledged. I want to see my wants on the list.

~~~
drum
sorry, seems like the spammers are blocking some requests from hitting the
Pusher api

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riz_
Idea: if the "as a"-field starts with a vowel, change the "a" to "an".

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milanvrekic
You should pivot. This is more useful as a joke generator.

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miguelrochefort
I'm the 555 guy. Let's talk about semantic communication.

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jcla1
Great idea really! Just the spam is a problem...

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alexjeffrey
watching this really shows you what some of the lurkers on HN are like. I'm
glad they tend to keep quiet on HN itself.

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nsomaru
phew, someone just automated it and is spamming you hard. this is interesting
to watch, thanks :P

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aitoehigie
what did you use to build this?

~~~
drum
Ruby on Rails, with the Sync Gem by Chris McCord and Pusher

~~~
chrismccord
Thanks for the mention! I love seeing examples of what people are building out
there. Some crafty visitor was spamming the list with scripted entries and the
updates were buttery smooth :)

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mogi57
Methinks it needs a captcha...

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antonwinter
boy there was a lot of talk about bananas when i took a look.

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Kapura
sounds like tailors want wang. Get on it, YC.

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abimaelmartell
can you limit the posts?

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mvbrasil
this is really cool!

~~~
drum
thanks! now if only i can prevent the spam...

~~~
schleppy_oc
Why not just use a simple csrf stored in a session? You already have an
"authenticiy_token" in the request data, why not use it, or add another value
for csrf?

