
Show HN: Wishminer – Mining social media for app ideas, my weekend project - julvo
https://wishminer.com
======
julvo
Dear HN,

Currently, I am stuck in a long-term project and really had the desire to
build and finish a small app - I guess some of you can relate.

So this weekend, I built Wishminer, a little tool which searches social media
for app ideas that people wish for. I hope it can be helpful to some of you.
It's fairly basic and nowhere close to perfect, but I would appreciate your
advice on how to improve it.

~~~
ecesena
Two ideas:

1) clustering similar ideas, for example when I looked at it there were
multiple about finding friends. Related, you could build an reddit-style
ranking instead of a purely temporal one

2) if you want to turn it into a product, maybe a way to share “hey, this is
exactly my app”... saw some similar comments here. Probably you’ll have to
work on anti-spam too :)

Good luck, great project so far!

~~~
zaarn
1) could probably be achieved reasonably by filtering out keywords from the
sources and simplify them ("app find friend" or "app sell item") and generate
tags based on that.

~~~
kamac
1) you could also try to use word embeddings for distance. Afaik they work
better than bag of words when few words are present in one observation.

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jamestimmins
Super cool weekend project! This is a great example of an MVP. The design and
functionality are all attractive, intuitive and consistent, but you kept the
scope very narrow and didn't get distracted by different filter methods,
search, etc.

Nicely done!

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LeonM
I see a lot of 'a laptop for school' wishes from teenagers. I'm curious
whether the current generation of cheap laptops just aren't cheap enough, or
is it a status thing where they actually mean they want an expensive Macbook?

~~~
neogodless
Having been poor, for a lot of people, you don't just "go out and buy a
laptop." You have to save up for it. You might be working two jobs while going
to school just to cover the bare costs of tuition, housing, food and possibly
transportation.

I saw one instance where it sounded like they had a computer, but not a
laptop. (Or they were stuck in the computer lab.) Another said they wish they
had a computer to help them jump-start a career for their family.

And like my sibling post points out, sometimes the laptops that are available
for $150-200 really are pretty terrible. When you have a limited budget, it
isn't appealing to save up for something, and then you buy it, and it's buggy
or painfully slow, or unable to run the software you'd need it to for your
classes.

And finally, when you don't have a lot of money, and you don't already have a
good computer yourself, and you maybe haven't learned all the tricks, you
don't know how to find a "good" laptop on the internet. (Not that it's wildly
hard - Amazon has some decent ones, depending on price point... but you won't
be coming from a place of confidence in your buying skills.)

The next step up seems to be - how many compromises can I avoid at my price
point? (This is super common on SlickDeals: you see $600-1000 laptops, and
people pick apart the CPU, the GPU, the weight, the screen technology, the HDD
vs SSD, the amount of RAM, the build quality. None of them get all of those
right because if they did, they would be $1200+ laptops, not deals!)

~~~
52-6F-62
Having been in the same place, I can second all of this. Even I’m my (40%
below market) current job I still take my time weeding through comparisOne to
consider the most weight for my money. The city is expensive.

That said I know of programs in this city where disadvantaged people can apply
to purchase refurbished laptops for between 30 and 100 CAD. They won’t get you
far in the work world but they might get you through a boot camp or part time
management of an EBay account or job search and some online courses, etc.
(Toronto)

There could be more of that, yeah? I haven’t had to go to that route. But I
can attest to the ability to get to that next rung being strengthened by
having the correct tool.

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aptwebapps
Just from the first page I found this one, "A restaurant that does food for
when you feel too sick to eat real food" which is interesting because normally
restaurants are not eager to cater to sick people, but if you combine it with
home delivery there might actually be a market.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Once I was out to dinner with my boss and his wife was sick at home. He asked
the waiter for a to-go order of “something very mild and bland”—I think the
result was steamed vegetables and rice.

I found this really interesting at the time because most restaurants wouldn’t
like to describe any of their food as “bland”! But sometimes that’s exactly
what you want—if you’re sick, hung over, a picky eater, or very sensitive to
textures/flavours (e.g. with ASD)—and you may not have the energy or time to
prepare something for yourself.

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nkkollaw
My favorite is "An app that reminds me to turn my phone on".

~~~
ulucs
I really miss alarms from the old time phones, the ones that didn't require
your phone to be open already

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solarkraft
Wishminer is a lot of fun, partly because some of the suggestions are so
crazy. I enjoy scrolling through them.

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gitgud
Good work! This could prove to be useful for both the wishers and wish-
granters. It looks great, but I had a couple of issues on my first impression:

1\. Not much info at the top of the page, could use a description, especially
mentioning the goal of trying to help people fulfill these wishes. (I
initially thought this was more of a selfish goal of mining/stealing ideas)

2\. All the wishes seem to be from Twitter, apart from one Reddit item. Maybe
a filter to categorize the different sources, or a total from each source at
the top of the page.

Very cool though, thanks for sharing and I hope you continue to work on it!

~~~
julvo
Thanks for taking the time. The missing description is a good point. I will
probably add an about section, to avoid the misunderstanding.

Twitter is the dominant source at the moment. Yeah, maybe filtering by source
could be useful, just wondering if reddit in this case would be too sparse.
I'll try to add more sources, but couldn't find any other good ones so far.

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a_imho
_An app for planning holidays with 1 click_

What's the closest to this? Is there an app where you can specify a
destination/price/date and have a 1 click checkout with your bookings and
tickets?

~~~
dawnerd
I vaguely remember a service posted here where you’d sign up and they’d find a
random trip for you and you wouldn’t know where you were going until the day
of.

Google flights is probably the closest to one click though. Super fast to view
destinations and prices without much effort.

~~~
WildGreenLeave
Maybe you are talking about Srprs.me[0]? They are only available in a few
countries within Europe, and they only let you travel to to other countries in
Europe but it is exactly what you are talking about.

[0] [https://srprs.me](https://srprs.me)

Edit: changed link to the correct one.

~~~
tinus_hn
There’s always going to be limitations because you can’t get visa or
vaccinations.

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aptwebapps
Heh. An app-interlock: "An app that only allows you to call taxis, your
parents or 999 when drunk and not any other numbers"

This is genius (the site, not the above idea).

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forkLding
Weird but saw at least 3 tweets validating my existing app, likely to be
frequency illusion.

Was definitely addicted in moving down to see more.

Im sharing this with my friend right now.

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tomcooks
Brilliant mvp, impressive cares for details bravo!

Note that you're rewriting html entities to their readable counterpart, eg:

``` Loved &amp; Found ```

~~~
julvo
Thanks you, good catch. Will fix it.

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rosege
someone wishing for myspace app made me laugh

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ehs
I just saw one which said "a show that's all about you", This sounds like a
very creepy idea which should be turned into a black mirror episode.

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akuji1993
And as always with this idea, people have no idea how IT and app development
works. I also want an app that does my dishes but that’s not how it works..

~~~
dawnerd
Bad example...

[http://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected-
appliances/dishwash...](http://www.geappliances.com/ge/connected-
appliances/dishwashers.htm)

Not too far off. If you get in the habit of putting dirty dishes in the washer
there’s no reason it can’t detect a full load and start a cycle. Could even
integrate a soap reservoir so you don’t have to even do that every day.

~~~
latexr
> Not too far off

There’s a big difference between an app that does my dishes and an app that
controls an _expensive and space-consuming_ machine that does my dishes.

Yes, you can’t have a $1 digital phone app that does the dishes on its own,
but I think that was OP’s point.

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bob_theslob646
Decent idea, but super hard to filter spam it seems.

Best of luck!

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aptwebapps
First three or so pages, four different versions of Tinder-but-for-finding-
friends.

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fiatjaf
Seems very good for a weekend -- for an year, even.

How do you do it?

~~~
julvo
Thank you. I'm using Firebase as a database and for hosting, which makes
development really fast.

For getting the data, I'm using a worker written in Python, which queries the
Twitter and Reddit APIs and does some regex filtering before writing it to the
database. In the future, it could be interesting to experiment with more
advanced NLP techniques for filtering/grouping/classifying.

~~~
parsthis
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Im impressed by what you've done with
just regex for the filtering. Which makes it possible to curate a dataset of
wishes to do some unsupervised clustering and fitering.

Filtering could benefit from knowing what other syntax ( phrases ) would map
to wishes, broadening the coverage.

Would love to work on this --let me know if you're open to that.

Either way, this is a useful project

~~~
andai
Re: finding other syntax, have you seen
[https://answerthepublic.com](https://answerthepublic.com) ?

That site lets you type in some key words and then it finds what questions
people are searching for on Google based on those keywords (with prefixes like
"who", "what", "where", and search suggestions).

Then it makes a nice big graph of the questions.

~~~
julvo
That's an amazing resource, thanks for sharing. Using autosuggestions might
actually be really useful.

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mlevental
neat. thanks. will probably waste a lot of time on this :)

