A Hacker News For Ideas

The concept isn't new and unfortunately the execution isn't either. The issue with sites like these is the poor signal to noise ratio. We're all capable of blind speculation and these sites seem to be riddled with "ideas" that are nothing more than a faint unattainable wishes.<p>There are people out there with real problems. They've lived the pain and have stories to share. There are also people out there that if they took the time to listen to that story and ask questions they might be able to formulate a real idea on how to fix or lessen that pain. And if they find a solution to a problem that people are willing to pay for, they'd have the seed of a business.<p>That's the site I want to see built.

People have a weird habit of treating Hacker News like a glorified CMS, when in fact it's a community with a distinct CMS. The CMS is actually quite awful for mobile or touch-based viewports, so Hacker News sometimes works <i>in spite</i> of its CMS.<p>That's why these things die, because there's some assumption that using the Hacker News CMS will somehow build an active community on its own.<p>We're seeing the same thing going on with all the forum/comment CMS being touted recently, but people are giving the CMS way too much credit for the - hypothetical - success of a community-based site.

I am not a fan of something like this. I think we do not have a good word for the "idea" part that actually has legs. I have tried to talk about this on HN from time to time.<p>There is something important in the concept portion of a project or business. I hate the meme that "Ideas do not matter, execution is everything." But I think we currently lack a sophisticated mental model for hashing out the important parts of the idea or conceptual model or mental framing. Lacking that framework, a project like this seems doomed to be a place to toss out silly ideas of no real merit that aren't likely to get developed.<p>I propose that if you want this to get traction and become meaningful, the site needs to become the place where that sophisticated framework gets discussed and developed.

For a while, I've been assembling a giant collaborative google doc of hackathon/startup project ideas with my friends that's been quite successful: <a href="http://hackathonprojects.tk/" rel="nofollow">http://hackathonprojects.tk/</a> Notably, we've developed a syntax for linking ideas to each other, so that people browsing the site can see hard-to-see relationships between people and projects that others have found. I've also been working on a dedicated web platform for this purpose (to facilitate ideation): IdeaOverflow. When you start typing in an idea, it uses MIT ConceptNet 4 as well as the manually established graph of ideas already present to attempt to suggest related ideas in the database.<p>I have larger aspirations as well... <a href="http://ideaoverflowideplan.tk/" rel="nofollow">http://ideaoverflowideplan.tk/</a><p>Email me at jcole@mit.edu if you'd like to work on this with me by the way! Basic django (or php! or js frontend!) skills are sufficient to be useful, though making a good interface to explore graphs is also a high priority... <a href="http://arborjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://arborjs.org/</a> is almost right but not quite.

Creating a Hacker News clone for X does not actually create a Hacker News for X, because HN is the community, the people, not the product itself.<p>Yes PG has created an awesome backend and easy to use front end free of complexities that other forums have, BUT its value is in the people, not the product.

I think this is a good example of why you can't just bolt on the UX from another site to a new concept and expect it to work. I looked at the page and just hit information overload.

Anyone remember <a href="http://www.halfbakery.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.halfbakery.com</a>? I guess it's still going.

What defines an 'idea'? The topics are so broad that creating a forum would lead to information overload, as pointed above by lysol.<p>For example, I have an idea to harness solar energy and power my gadgets, how would I file it? What tags would I use? It would get very messy very fast.<p>Then again, ideas want to have sex, and a messy environment can lead to a breakthrough. But forums are too linear, perhaps brainstorms are a better approach. My startup, <a href="http://www.wikibrains.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikibrains.com</a> (beta) is aiming to 'engineer serendipity' by having users share content or brief comments on a 'per topic' basis or string search. It is a difficult task.

Is there a HN for Designers? I peruse Behance and Dribbble for ideas, but since I'm a programmer and not a designer I really need read discussions and tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, design theory, color, etc. I would think that there's enough material. Occasionally, really good stuff like this appears on HN:<p><a href="http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/" rel="nofollow">http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/</a><p>I'd like a daily dose.

We need a Hacker News for problems, not ideas. Let people state their problems, and see what's effecting peoples' lives the most.

It seems backwards to me. Why "ideas?" Why not "problems?" Think bar room, not board room.

Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but since you're working on a HN-like site I'd be curious to know if you gave Telescope (<a href="http://telesc.pe" rel="nofollow">http://telesc.pe</a>) a try?<p>And if you did, what made you decide not to use it?

There's formal processes for formulating ideas. Loosely described as "the creative process" or "design thinking" which to me largely mimic the Waterfall development process.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking#Design_thinking_as_a_process_for_problem-solving" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking#Design_thinking...</a><p>I don't see discussion style sites like hn or reddit being successful at coordinating something like that. At least explicitly. It feels more like a punt. As if provided you can get enough people looking at something, magically it will work itself out.

How about making it a Hacker News for non-techies? I have a lot of friends reading HN who know nothing about programming are only interested in the other stuff (startups, marketing, science in general etc).

Ideas &#62; worthless<p>Opportunities &#62; valuable<p>Create a site to discuss actual opportunities and signal to noise would be very different. Also, the site could look like shit or Craigslist and nobody would care.<p>A site to discuss ideas degenerates into nonsense very quickly. I mean, when I look a floating helium balloon clock was the top-voted item. Right.<p>The problem is that people are not likely to discuss real opportunities openly. Opportunities have a direct link to real business. Ideas usually don't.

Platforms for businesses to share real problems are already out there. Go sign up to forums for accountants, CPAs, real estate agents. What do they struggle with, what common themes are are there, what part of their job do they joke about loving (because they hate it so much)? Go sign up to student forums, teacher forums, landlord's forums. Buy their magazines, go to their meetups. It's all out there already.

So many ideas that are discussed in forums like that are already patented. 95% of the time, the product never made it to market, 4% of the time the product did make it to market but wasn't successful. I've done patent searches for friends with "new ideas" and it turns out someone patented it 40 years ago.<p>full disclosure: I have a patent, that ended up in the 4% category. On to other things...

I like the site and while I couldn't see myself using many (any?) of the ideas, it sure did trigger a flood of related and/or symbiotic ideas.<p>As an aside, I'm not so thrilled about the "Mens suit that turns transparent when lying". It's based on heart-rate, what if you almost step in front of a bus and your BPM increases due to the shot of adrenaline your body produces?

This system favors people with a network of friends who solicit and coordinate up-votes! Don't tell me it doesn't happen on HN.<p>However, I liked the concept enough to submit an idea myself, <a href="http://firespotting.com/item?id=340" rel="nofollow">http://firespotting.com/item?id=340</a><p>Now, can you please up-vote my thread :p

Thanks for trying ;). What would be cool is if we had a concept similar to startup weekend applied here. People post problems and community posts ideas to solve it which get voted up and eventually it turns into an open-source project on github ;). I'm happy to help with it.

Amazon Cloud doesn't seem to scale, site is slow. Please use better service platform. (Yeah, I know.)

This is like Highdeas without the "hey weed sure is cool" posts.<p>I'm not sure if that's an improvement.

It'd be better with proper meta tags. Think: people come to HN, click your link, and bookmark your site. Will they ever remember what the heck "firespotting.com/newest" was about? Not likely, unless you add some decent meta!

Having a 'leaders' section that encourages people to vie for submitting the most content doesn't seem to send the right signal this early on.

Slightly off topic - that kind of design (cloning and changing colors a bit) - where it stands on copyright/trademark ?

Looks like nice idea. is it supposed to be a sunset of hacker mews?

Why is this built using tables? Jesus Christ people! It's <i></i>harder<i></i> to build these sites using tables than it is using semantic HTML and CSS, why struggle to make things broken _and_ harder?

Here's the biggest problem with these sorts of ideas:<p><a href="http://firespotting.com/item?id=341" rel="nofollow">http://firespotting.com/item?id=341</a>

awesome