Kick start the first Idea Sunday of May.<p>(PLEASE upvote if you like this post to be seen by more people, as someone in the previous Idea Sunday mentioned the post with less points than number of comments will be penalized in ranking. Thanks.)
Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them.<p>Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answer is no.<p>Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular.<p>I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938</a>
A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply.<p>Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses. Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant sections and evidence that needs to be provided to have a successful conviction.<p>The same can be applied to divorce, patents, property etc.<p>My idea was to use an Erlang map reduce system to help fan out the queries which are dispatched to an underlying Prolog knowledge base (Erlang supports something like Channels/Ports).<p>I have a bias towards ideas which have a social impact.<p>The business case is: In a country like India there are over 20 million pending cases in courts.<p>Imagine both sides of lawyers and the judge all having access to a system like this - cases could be resolved a lot faster and time spent building defense/prosecution would be a significantly smaller.<p>Implemented right, this could somewhat level the playing field and allow poorer people have access to some sort of legal advice, which today they would not be able to afford. Monetizing the system could be charging for queries as you probe deeper and deeper into the system/advertising for lawyers.<p>I think commoditizing law has immense potential and should have a very large business potential.<p>I always wanted to implement and Idea like this as Open Source, but here in India nobody would fund ideas like this. I'm putting it out there as I believe it's time has come.
A/B testing for the masses.<p>Here's an example: Say a someone is deciding which shirt to wear. They whip out their smartphone, launch the A/B app, takes a picture of themselves wearing each of two shirts. Within 30 seconds, they have an answer of which shirt hundreds of people liked better. While they're waiting for the reply, they're prompted to rate other people's pictures. This is as simple as seeing two pictures and tapping the one that they like more.<p>The number of use cases is endless. You could be shopping for eyeglasses and trying to figure out which look better - just try on both right there in the store and get a response from the A/B app.<p>It's not limited to fashion, as people could use it for any subjective comparison.
A service that sits between my bank account and subscription services that only accepts charges that I've preapproved.<p>This would let me keep track of the services that I have so I don't end up with subscriptions to sites or services that I've forgotten about. It would also let me revoke permission to charge the account at any time. No need to cancel a card if one won't cancel or changes the fees--you just revoke their permission individually.
"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie:<p><pre><code> $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo
$ please archive this directory into foo.zip
$ please clone the bootstrap repo from github
$ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar'
</code></pre>
Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly switches and just did what we said?<p>It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and vocabulary.
A service combining the flexibility and ease of use of a CMS site (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) with the speed and security of a static HTML site.<p>The CMS version would be a private site (not accessible by the general public) which is compiled into a static HTML site which is publicly accessible.<p>There should be a way to deal with formerly dynamic elements, such as contact/comment forms, site search, etc. (possibly using third party APIs)<p>There also should be a way to deal with updates to the CMS version of the site, so that these changes are detected, compiled and processed into the static version of the site.
DNS for the Post Office.<p>When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. <i>Once</i>.<p>Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.
If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can be played while viewing the movie.<p>Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary. The service should seek out talent to create the commentary tracks and pay them for their work.
What's stopping us from making something like <a href="http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/</a>? Samsung came out with a phone in 2010 with an e-ink keyboard (Samsung Zeal). Are there any unsolved obstacles preventing this kind of keyboard from becoming a reality?<p>I would imagine such a keyboard, even at a $300 price point, would be massively more successful than the Optimus Maximus ever was.<p>To entice users even more, it could probably be made water resistant by not including any ports and using appropriate switches. It could come with a USB-powered inductive charging matt that you place the keyboard on top of to charge.
A website that allows maintainers of open-source projects to flag/create tickets where it would be helpful for others to help out.<p>I personally want to make more OSS contributions, but often I find it hard to find projects where I can contribute meaningfully. Meaning specifically that they are projects that have problems that match my expertise, are actively maintained (my patches will be appreciated), and have unresolved tickets where assistance would be useful (they are looking for outside help).<p>I imagine there are at-least some OSS maintainers who would like to recruit more contributors as well, and a site that would help match both would be beneficial for everyone.
An online organizational space for HOA's. It would allow HOA members to view the budget, see the monthly meeting agenda, file proxy votes, see any open issues, and vote on board members.<p>I have the feeling (based on personal experience) that some HOA managers prefer to operate in obscurity, so it may be tough to market.
My idea is to make Idea Sunday and Screenshot Saturday monthly posts instead of weekly. Maybe the second weekend of each month so as not to crowd the hiring/freelance posts at the start of the month?<p>Also have them posted by an "official" account so it doesn't turn into a karma grab.
I was inspired by Marc Andreessen's post this weekend about news/journalism [1]. So, here's my idea for an editorial news site:<p>The site would be called "5 ON 5"<p>and every post would be based on a current news topic. In each post, 2 writers/bloggers would argue opposing views of the topic (point/counterpoint). BUT each argument must be written in a BuzzFeed listicle style format. For example:<p>5 ON 5: UKRAINE
"5 reasons Obama needs to stay out of the Ukraine/Russia crisis" vs. "5 things Obama needs to do for Ukraine right now"<p>and<p>5 ON 5: FACEBOOK F8 CONFERENCE
"You should put Facebook's anonymous login in your app. Here's 5 reasons why." vs. "5 reasons Facebook's new anonymous login is bad for developers"<p>I like it because it could work for any news category, it could be for analysis and prognostication, you could presumably get great guest writers, and it's "smart" spin on the viral crap BuzzFeed/Gawker puts out.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreesen-why-im-bullish-on-the-news-105921.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreese...</a>
An issue tracker for freelancers and small teams that is designed to be used collaboratively with clients, without burdening clients with unnecessary detail.<p>Clients see a list of user stories or other deliverables and can discuss, and file issues and bugs against them. Developers can track their own bugs, finer-grained tasks and issues privately. These two sides of the software are linked for the developer, i.e. as a developer I can add detail and break down a client request into smaller stories without exposing the client to the gritty details, and keep track of which client request(s) different issues and stories are related to. Also useful for filing issues the client doesn't need to know about, say, bugs I find before they do :)<p>The problem this solves is that I have to maintain two issue trackers, one focused on user stories and features (usually a google spreadsheet), and another for more technical tasks and bugs (usually pivotal tracker). I want to keep it all in one place. I would be surprised if this doesn't already exist, but I haven't been able to find it.
A code review tool specifically for Golang projects based on many of the contribution guidelines listed here <a href="http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html" rel="nofollow">http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html</a><p>A few months ago when I made some contributions to Go I realized I like their code review process and tools much more than the typical GitHub PR workflow.
Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I can look for new ideas posted.
VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially].
I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).
An MMO where all content is created by players using a wiki-like interface. Editing privilege is tied to a "creation skill" that levels up with each approved editing action.
A/B testing for physical products, making hardware more agile.<p>Market validation and iterative development for hardware can take a long time. Product developers are jealous of the fast iterations involved with software development. I've recently learned that despite being lower quality, people value the novelty of 3D printed goods. And we know that consumers value co-creation [1].<p>We know that early adopters tend to be early adopters of multiple kinds of technology. So if your user base for a new physical product also largely have 3D printers, you could bring your users into your prototyping process. Send out 2+ versions of your product without them knowing which version they received.<p>You can ask for feedback within 2 days of pushing out a design with real users. From the feedback you can start a new iteration, which you can then push out to your users as a tangible update within a week. You could even pay for the small cost of material used.<p>This platform could start with STL files, and then in the future use a common 3D printing API such as the one we're building called PrintToPeer. Early adopters would even be incentivized to get a 3D printer to be a part of the development cycle of new products.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect</a>
A few Idea Sundays ago I suggested an idea [1] for a location-based city guide for tourists (with comment voting and based on discoverability).<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048</a><p>Here's another such idea (based on finding answers)...<p>____<p>A clean, dead-simple search engine that connects to information from Q&A data about the city you're in. So it's a Q&A site (again, with comment voting) regarding tourist-type questions and answers. The user can ask a new question ahead of their trip and hope for answers but the real use case is where the Q&A database is extensive enough that most questions are asked and answered already.<p>Ex. - Enter the Paris section. Type in the search field "hours Louvre" and the first and best answer would be the opening and closing times of the famous museum. No other clutter on the page.<p>Ex. 2 - If GPS-enabled, type in "bus Louvre" and it'd bring up the most relevant answer. "Take the 765. Every 30 min. Next one at 9am."<p>Short, sweet and simple. Only thing is, it'd need a Wikipedia-style editor allowing for corrections when answer is no longer current.
Relational binary data serialization.<p>Cap'n Proto is a great piece of engineering that got quite a lot of things right. (For those who aren't familiar, Cap'n Proto is a data serialization format that is able to be very fast by encoding data in the same way modern processors encode data normally - with fixed width data types and pointers.) I think it would be nice to have a data serialization protocol that uses the same general concepts, but addresses a couple limitations in that format, including:<p>- Cap'n Proto doesn't allow you to edit messages in a robust way. You can't change the size of a list/string in a message, you can't replace one object with another without leaking "garbage", etc. The data model is simply not designed with fast editing in mind.
- The data model is document based so it is inconvenient or impossible to capture certain kinds of relationships with a schema.<p>My idea is to address these limitations using the battle tested relational model and the massive amount of knowledge that's been accumulated about how to efficiently implement relational systems. In this serialization format, a message would be a veritable relational dataset, complete with a schema and multiple tables. Messages would be organized into pages, each page representing a node in a b tree, as in a normal rdbms. You can add, edit, and delete rows as necessary, and just send the binary encoding of the database over the wire directly. The utility of this system is obvious: a client could, for example, read an entire database from one server, add a row to a table (without parsing the rest of the message, which are in other tables on other pages), and forward the new database directly to another server. Being able to quickly edit even large datasets in this way would be a huge boon.
I'm starting to work on a marketing tool which will be a combination of displaying popups like Bounce Exchange(<a href="http://bounceexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bounceexchange.com/</a>) and Tweetganic(<a href="http://www.tweetganic.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tweetganic.com/</a>) or <a href="http://snip.ly/" rel="nofollow">http://snip.ly/</a>.<p>Currently Social Media Management tools like Hootsuite provide a link shortner so it's relatively easier for them to integrate a service like <a href="http://snip.ly/" rel="nofollow">http://snip.ly/</a> however they don't.<p>The product I'm thinking to create will allow anyone to manage, split test their pop ups and promote themselves using a service like snip.ly. An analytics module will accompany the product so all the data can be meaningfully used to enhance the campaigns.<p>Hope I was able to clearly explain my idea. Would detail out some more if anyone is interested.
Think about how many cool videos are made with the Go Pro. Snowboarding videos, skydiving videos, etc.<p>Now think about how cool it would be to have the type of frozen fly-around video that you see in moves like The Matrix. In fact, it should be super easy to create such a thing. Instead of just a photo, why can't we have a frozen moment in time, virtually in 3d?<p>In fact, I first thought of this idea in terms of wedding photography (an industry in need of a lot of innovation, btw.)<p>What I propose is a "string of cameras" that you can easily place anywhere, and will simultaneously shoot a photo. All of those photos are then instantly turned into a video.<p>Cameras have become low-cost enough that a product like this could be produced at a mass market price. Yes, it is a niche product, but so is the Go Pro. But, the best argument for this idea is that it would be really damn fun to play with one.<p>Someone, please steal this idea. All I ask is that you make it happen.
Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows a normal home to monitor:
1)What food has been bought?
2)What the expiration date is? Warnings when food is going out of date.
3)What meals can be made based on the food “in stock”?<p>I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home.<p>I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps would be very useful.<p>It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping engines such as instacart.<p>Any feedback on this greatly appreciated.
A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server, it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's password or RSA private key, and the private key would be also encrypted the same way, and when these keys are needed, the server sends them to the browser, the javascript decodes them with the user's account password and voilá. So it would be a browser-based Skype with Mega-like encryption.
With the growth of electronic commerce and mobile commerce, fraud is going to be a factor for all businesses that have a web presence. Online fraud takes a variety of forms but charge-backs appear to be the most preventable. Using a multi-layer strategy of various prevention and detection methods (fraud scoring model, device profiling, new type of authentication), merchants install a plug-in and do not have to worry about monitoring transactions for fraud.<p>Based on a few sources, fraud has been staying around 1% of e-commerce revenues.
A single site that aggregates and live demo or video demo of open source projects...<p>Skimming through and reading each open source project to figure out exactly what it does or having to read code, install it, or run it in some form just to get a better idea is a pain in the ass (personal opinion). It would be awesome to have a way to go through projects fast and _see_ what they're about before starring at their repo. Reading descriptions is not as awesome as seeing the product when possible.
A site to discover content using an algorithm that ignores metrics we have begun to game (likes and viewings) and instead builds rankings based on pairwise comparisons.<p>Would allow discovery of new good content that hasn't employed growth hacks and will also differentiate between equally rated content.<p><a href="https://aeolipyle.co" rel="nofollow">https://aeolipyle.co</a> (algorithm complete -- need to find good use for it.)
Created an opensource plugin architecture for currently Chrome, but can be Firefox as well. Consists of repositories and plugins you can enable and disable. These plugins will add extra functionality to an existing website, or change layout for example. <a href="https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome</a>
A Google-reader like service for your YouTube channels subscriptions. I'd like to have a list of videos from my subscriptions I can turn into a video magazine I can e.g. watch each Sunday.<p>It's super annoying that to keep up with your subscriptions on YouTube you have to click on each channel and manually work out which videos you've seen and which you haven't.
- a "Prezi-like" software for software documentation. You can navigate, zoom out to the project specs, zoom in for the code;<p>- think about how google maps show you the time a given route would take in the current traffic. What I want is the possibility to see what the time would be in a future date and time, based on historical data (no, google maps does not have this);
With StackTray (opensource) you can manage all your EC2 instances from the OSX statusbar. Currently only Amazon AWS is supported, but planning to extend with PaaS, but also DigitalOceaan, Google Compute Engine and Azure. <a href="https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray</a>
A site with free, open, community driven practice problems and solutions. Sort of like a wikipedia for questions. I could imagine this being a key ingredient in the future of OER. Would be cool to see something like this integrated with <a href="http://metacademy.org" rel="nofollow">http://metacademy.org</a>
I bought "thecoffeeprophecy.com" On a whim a while ago... Suggestions so far have included a straight to kindle thriller, tripadvisor for coffee shops, and a service where I cover myself in coffee grounds on webcam and predict things for people. Suggestions welcome...
I'd like some way to listen to Hacker News.<p>I know that's ambiguous, and I'm not sure how it'd be implemented. But I often listen to podcasts when working from home and often wish for a way to consume Hacker News in the same way.
I'd love the LeechBlock extension for Firefox to be recreated as a Mac application. There are similar distraction-blocking tools but none that allow you to set time-based rules for the blocking to take place.
An anonymous linkedin
My only interaction with other people if it there's a business/freelance opportunity. Invite only and where names appear when the deal is real.
I continue to keep this updated over time: <a href="https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas</a>
A Bitcoin like protocol for sending/receiving real money (USD, INR). Why to pay 2% to banks and card processors when we can use blockchain for the same.
Hack Raid - world of warcraft raids meet hackathon. Visual raid management tools allows raid leader to manage teams on quick projects to prove out interesting hacks that could form the basis of real companies. Contributors pick from raids they want to join based on the merit the leadership and idea. Time period for raid is compressed but very focused.
A service that sits on top of/aggregates sports clips and learns from the clips that I watch/view/like/share to determine if a sports clip is relevant for me, irregardless of source (even if just providing links to third parties).
A payment form that supports subscriptions and one time payments. It has options for taxes and it comes in English French and Spanish. Moonclerk but with taxes and languages. Chargify with a beautiful form and languages.
Hacker news 2.0<p>An actual tech news column with reporters and a sleek website and or maybe a podcast here and there<p>I mean seriously why hasn't that happened yet
A meta-data file over VLC player where people can add additional information about a movie so that others watching the movie can skip right to that part.
Say, a movie has a few funny scenes, or action or even sex, and you only are bothered to watch those parts. Then you can use this file to see at which time period these scenes exist in the movie, and jump right into it.<p>Not exactly a startup idea, but something that can be useful, eh?