Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Experiment HN: Idea Day Results
46 points by kyro on Nov 13, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 68 comments
Alright folks. Idea day deadline has finally been reached, so let's hear the three (or more) problems/frustrations/annoyances you experienced/overheard/observed today with possible solutions!

This is in reference to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937032 for those who are confused.



* No decentralized, redundant, internet archive. Solution? I dunno. I've been banging away at it for years.

* No easy way to search my personal web/reading history. The problem is not just collection, it's relevance. I want to go back and find a book recommendation on design I saw in a blog post sometime in the last week. I dunno where it is or if I bookmarked it. Solution? Google Desktop / WebMynd plus some radically different ideas about search.

* I can't use Amazon EC2 with Mosso CloudFiles quickly, cheaply, and at scale. Solution? Cloud peering.


I've thought about number two as well. How about a combination of caching all pages you read and how long you are spending on each page (and maybe if you scrolled as well)?

The idea is to save enough data that you can have an algorithm that will automatically differentiate between stuff you closed within a couple of seconds and didn't really read and stuff that interested you and you actually read through. And the reason for doing this automatically is it seems very difficult to have the discipline take an action every time you see a page that you may want to save so that you can search through again (such as clicking a box for every such page).

Whatever mechanism it is, it needs to account for stuff read through readers and over multiple computers/devices too. I don't want to miss a search result just because I was reading it on an iPhone or in my Google Reader.

Or instead of caching locally, a search interface that would accept a long list of urls to look through.


I have thought about it as well. The signals that could determine relevancy in your browser history are likely different form the ones that determine it for web search, and measuring engagement with a page is a good example (it would help web search as well, but it would be harder to measure).

Other things you'd take into account are:

* continuity in time - reading several pages on similar topics one after the other.

* analysis of the subgraph of the web graph that you visited

* you'd be more aggressive with query expansion because you work with much smaller corpus, e.g. you'd want to take hypernyms and hyponyms into account


Ah yes, engagement is the word. Interesting. I'd imagine the query expansion should also work across the author dimension--include and rank matches from the same blog higher, even if according to my history, I haven't read that post.


I was thinking about #2 last night actually. I was reading an issue of CACM and thought it would be useful to keep a database of all journals, research papers and magazines I read and tagging them with categories and other metadata. Then in a few years, I might think "hmm, I'm looking for X" and search the database and find a list of journals, research papers and magazines that are relevant. I think that it would work, since after a while I would learn which tags mean what, so later I'd think "XYZ, thats tags A, B and C - search!"


Do you use Zotero? If so, how does it or does it not fit your needs?


I'd never heard of it, actually. I will give it a look - thanks!


What about http://www.archive.org doesn't work for you about #1? It's centralized but this is hardly a practical problem; search is also centralized and much more important.


The biggest problem is that a centralized archive is at the mercy of copyright holders ex-post-facto. I defy you to find more than a few recent articles from the NYTimes.com on archive.org. Things get taken down all the time.


The best solution I've found for #2 is Firefox's Awesome Bar. However, that requires you remember at least one word in the title, at which point Google is probably about as effective.


for your #2 see 'boomtango'


* Carpool coordination. This problem turned into our next homework assignment for my collaborative work class. I'm thinking of something that lets each team member mark down their home, adjust it on a per-day basis if they'll be somewhere else, mark down which days they can drive, and plot optimal routes. Extra points for a mobile app that can read my GPS coordinates and tell me where to go. More points if it balances driving responsibilities well enough that nobody feels taken advantage of.

* Too many notifications. I have to login to a half dozen different systems to keep up on what's happening. That's too much. There are notifications I just want to see, some I want to add to my todo list, some to my calendar, some I don't want to see again. A single-app solution for all of this would be brilliant. Email is too heavy: I want notifications, not correspondence. Bonus points if it's on my mobile.

* Some way to extract the most valuable points out of a meeting. A possible solution might be a 'real time digg' that lets people vote speakers up and down when they agree or disagree with their point. Correlate that with a copy of the transcript and emphasize sections with higher scores. Possibly two-dimensional voting for 'We need to remember this' and 'I agree with this'.


A twitter to email service, and when you unsubscribe to a twitter account giving notifications, it unsubscribes you from the underlying emails.

It can be a new service not built on Twitter, say on identi.ca or friendfeed.

There'd be an API, so parties sending out emails can build into the service with a pre-established userbase.

Do you want to build it?

(afterward ... with relationships established with businesses.. can follow through into my idea http://bit.ly/1MscB3)


I think you're looking at this backwards. Instead of an API, to start you allow users to send or forward their notification emails to some unique email address that's their feed. RSS notifications are handled similarly by the user subscribing to their feeds within the app. Tie into the existing notification mechanisms instead of asking the world to change just for you.

Given the amount of reaction this comment thread got, I'm considering hacking out a prototype and seeing if it helps alleviate the problem. That being said, I've already got far too much on my plate. I don't think you'd ever come up with this idea if you were the kind of person who had time to kill checking their notifications.


A couple of things, for your interest: rssfriends.com provides feeds for twitter email notifications, that you can then turn off.

I'm possibly willing to spend $4000 on this, or something like it, which I'll build the front-end - depending on my work schedule.

The other side of the coin is information you'd like from firms, but are not getting, rather than vice versa - hence the friendfeed for business information.

(edit: the other aspect is having the end user be able to respond to some type of company information, in a type of Google Wave, so another response can be made)


I might hack together a version, I might not. Don't worry about that. If you're this interested, I'd encourage you to take the idea and run with it.


If you need a hand - drop me a line.


#2 - I believe mozilla is working on it already - http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop


The notifications idea is very useful. I can immediately see a need for merging twitter, facebook, gcal, gmail and gdocs into one menubar/systray app. Even a simple web app using tornado would already be useful.

I'm surprised no one has done this?


...I'm working on this now! I am planning to add a feature to Femtoo.com (http://www.femtoo.com) so that users can drop a 'track this page' link onto their site (blog etc) and be notified of changes...

...should be done by the weekend...


I don't actually use FriendFeed, but isn't that what it wanted to achieve re:notifications?


No, it wanted to achieve conversations.


Point 2 - you could try to see if Femtoo.com (http://www.femtoo.com) (Internet tracking and notifications) will help solve your problem.

I built it with the intention of 'reducing' the amount of correspondance, and to only notify you of something that you exactly want.


>> Too many notifications

What sort of notifications? Please share some examples.


In addition to the ones that were already mentioned, I also care about:

Class announcements (currently emailed to me)

Reminders from my calendar (currently email or rss'd)

New posts from blogs I follow (currently RSS)

Notification of shared document changes (currently login to each service to check)

Private messages on forums (currently emailed)


E-mail, twitter, calendar invitations, meeting notifications, facebook messages, linkedin, text messages, voicemail, finance-related alerts, sports scores...


1. Startup marketing: should be easier to get a list of all blogs that you can contact. Also I found that the contact forms are next to impossible to find on a lot of sites

Solution: site that lets you generate a list of sites to contact. With direct links to that site's contact us page.

2. New Season TV updates for basic cable, you know what I'm talking about you watch a TV channel and they keep repeating the same shows 20 times over.

Solution: site that let's you "follow" a show + channel, and get notifications when that channels starts airing a new season.

3. Where are they now? Where are all of those celebrities, politicians, musicians that have retired from the public eye? What are they doing now?

Solution: IMDB like site for retired personalities. Would show things like,

   Name: John Doe
   Famous For: Congressman from XX from 19xx-19xx
   Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
   Current Occupation: Lobbyist for ______
or

   Name: James Doe
   Famous For: Actor(Movie #1(amazon link) - Movie #2(amazon link)
   Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
   Current Occupation: retired in Florida, spends his spare time working on his bikes.


Point 2: You can use Femtoo.com (http://www.femtoo.com) to track a webpage (wikipedia for example) to be notified of new seasons/episodes...

You can be notified by email and Instant Messager (if you register using a gmail account).


NNDB (http://www.nndb.com/) may be relevant to #3.


2 would be relatively easy to accomplish by scraping www.epguides.com.


A toaster combined with a smoke alarm 'SHOULD' result in a machine that does not burn toast.


wow that's really clever! I wonder if it's been done. I might try it. Maybe CO2 detector though? I wouldn't want Americium near my toast ...


Understanding written text is a universal problem and even minor improvements would matter.

Syntax highlighting for natural language is a possible improvement. I have tried variations of this with no success so far: parts-of-speech tagging in color doesn't seem to help, for example. Automatic extraction and highlighting of named entities is probably most promising.

More generally, it's about ways to help humans understand electronic text better by providing them hints and interactions that were not possible (or were difficult) with paper.

An established example of this is searching within a page. There are different implementation of this, some better than others: search-as-you-type is good, and so is highlighting all results. I haven't yet seen implementations of query expansion like search engines do: correcting spelling mistakes, finding all word forms, finding synonyms. Finding several terms close to one another would also be helpful.


1. Plastic bags are all around.

   Solution: Make paper bags and sell those. Use less plastic. Spread awareness.
2. Web hosting/downloads (read the solution).

   Solution: Make all the servers a network of bittorent peers.
   This way load balancing, and bandwidth problems can be solved.
   Downloads can be stopped and resumed.
   After some time the server need not host the file at all.
   There will be virtually no down time.
   If web sites can be served using the bitorrent technology, awesome!
3. I have a lot of old books.

   Solution: Some web service to exchange old books free of cost.


The plastic bags problem was solved years ago in many places.

In the Uk and europe (western europe anyway) supermarkets now either (a) don't let you have them at all, (b) make you pay for them, or (c) let you have them but make you ask the checkout operator instead of having a bunch that you can help yourself to.

Most supermarkets are also selling larger more sturdy plastic shopping bags. These are marketed as a 'green' iniative as using less of the other bags is supposedly good for the environment.


Here's the UK situation with bags:

The Waitrose near me has makes a half-assed effort, whereby no matter how much stuff you have (literally, a heaped shopping cart), the lady will look at you and ask "Do you need a bag?" The idea is that if they ask, sometimes you'll say no, and use fewer bags. Usually I respond with something like "Nah, I'll just take the cart, thanks" or "It's fine, I'm a great juggler" or some other stupid quip.

Marks & Spencer also ask you if you want a bag. If you say yes, they charge you 10 pence PER bag. So if you do a lot of shopping at M&S, you really need to bring your own suitcase or something.

Tesco doesn't give a crap. They find baby seals and tie plastic Tesco bags on their heads.


San Francisco, at least, has banned plastic bags. Individual stores try to incentivize reusable bags by charging some nominal fee for using in-store bags (usually $0.01-$0.05 if you don't bring your own bag).


Try bookmooch.com for books exchange. Its pretty good, and you just have to pay for postage, the service itself is free.


I want to work on #3 eventually


For #3, try bookcrossing.com?


Is there a site like this for video games?


Here's one for books, games, music albums, and videos:

http://www.swaptree.com/


http://www.goozex.com


* DVD/CD burning: the fact that people still produce coasters in 2009 is a travesty.

* Video authoring: with the complexity of containers, codecs, DVD formats etc. it's still far from what the MP3 was even 6 or 7 years ago, despite iMovie's best efforts.

* Because of the way the Western 12-note musical system is devised, guitars have intonation problems that can never be fully overcome. I found the solution to this about 5 minutes ago: http://www.truetemperament.com/site/index.php Quite whacky.


The wireless 'Copy and Paste' mouse - click a file or highlighted text, click a 'copy' button on your mouse and the data is transferred to an SD card in the mouse... point the mouse at another computer and click the 'paste' button on the mouse to transfer the data to another PC ... imagine how much time would be saved instead of uploading/sending files/data using MSN or Skype to send something to the guy sat next to you... GENIOUS, I should probably patent this...


I occasionally like to give talks at conferences that will have me (thus proving they're not really very important venues?;-), but you need to be aware of the conference months ahead of time to submit a talk, and I'm interested in stuff in different fields. I need a way to learn about conferences and their submission deadlines.


You can use http://www.femtoo.com for exactly this!

With Femtoo.com you can track events - you can specify what type of event you are interested in (conferences for example), enter some keywords (Java, Pottery etc) and when the event is schedules (3 months in advance), you will be notified.

You can be notified by email, Instant Message, or a URL callback.

When you've logged in, choose to create an 'Event Tracker'...enjoy!

(I sympathize, I built Femtoo to avoid missing concerts of my favourite bands!)


Please stop spamming your site all over this thread!


1) Home-delivery, inner city parcel service and taxi service having a centralized system. It will be a B2B and B2C combined together to make things more efficient

2) Higher cab fares during night time so that drivers have incentives to operate during night, especially, on friday and saturday nights.

3) Lower medical/insurance costs


2) Higher cab fares during night time so that drivers have incentives to operate during night, especially, on friday and saturday nights.

What? You're going to incentivize driving over taking a cab? At least in NYC, this is a huge mistake.

Incentivize biking for everyone and good public transit. If you're going to think about fixing transit, stop thinking about cars in the first place.


I have to strongly disagree with #2 as it will discourage drunk people further from calling a cab instead of driving home.

There's an idea - Bar Van, free rides home from the bar, completely funded by advertising from area businesses that want to support "don't drink and drive" initiatives.


Bar Van, free rides home from the bar, completely funded by advertising from area businesses that want to support "don't drink and drive" initiatives.

The idea is well intentioned, but what kind of liability do you think private companies would get from putting a bunch of drunk people in a crowded van at 2AM on a weekend? I think it would have to be a state sponsored thing for it to work.


Liability? Probably nothing worse than putting a bunch of drunk people in a crowded bar at 2 am on a weekend. That is to say none at all.


Headline reads: Girl gets groped by drunk man in van sponsored by Bob's Bakery. Alleges sexual assault and vows to pursue legal action against all parties.

Maybe there's no legal liability for Bob's Bakery in a situation like that, but it is certainly bad for business.


Many of the bars around the college I graduated from had a "drunk bus" that would give you a free ride home. The only expectation was that you tip the driver a few bucks. There was even one that would pick you up and take you to their bar...


Or for a pizza place: buy a pizza, free ride home.


Order a pizza delivery while at the store, and you get to ride along!


I've never understood why pizza places don't rent movies.

"Oh crap, I have a late movie sitting here collecting fines. I'll just order another pizza so they'll pick it up..."


I saw a local pizzeria do this in the mid 90s. I thought it was a great idea, but I guess others did not agree with me. The place went out of business and is now a Dunkin' Donuts.


re #2: cab fares in both the UK and Australia are higher at night during the peak times when everyone wants to get to or from a bar/club


See http://idea-ne.ws for a slightly lighter take on new ideas.


All I get is: "502 Bad Gateway"


Remembering seeing something on the internet years ago and not being able to find it now. Why can't my computer record every page I visit, everything that comes across my screen, everything I type, etc? We have the memory.


New TV series go so wrong. They open up all these story lines and then the show gets canceled and you're left frustrated and confused. Sarah Conner chronicles and Kyle XY are two examples.

My solution, a voluntary agency to preapprove tv series to make sure they have adequate funding and buy in from the network to stay alive until the story reaches a conclusion, and that the story is coherent and makes sense. Viewers like me would only watch shows that get this approval.


The random quality of haircuts. Solution: shave it all off the next day.


I kind of put them in the other thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937184 )


lasers to shoot down mosquitoes and eradicate maleria

better...belief persuasion. existence would be so much less traumatic if belief in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation could be instilled after childhood.

for serious this time: ...

nah, who am i kidding. i'm educated, certified, white, and working on my own startup. i live the most charmed existence imaginable (other than the no afterlife thing). i think it's better to scratch more worthwhile wounds.


"Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: