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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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101–110 of 453 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#101
post #59

A crowd-funding charity website that collects monthly very tiny micro-payment (as little as .10 cents) from users for charity. This way many users would sign up, worry free, as .10 cents a month is extremely affordable and can add up to a lot of money with scale.

OK, on the topic of funding charities, an old idea that I haven't gotten around to yet: A JS plugin that companies (or regular folks) put on their blogs, which generates a downloadable PDF of the article people are reading, but have to pay $1 to download.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#102
I'd like to see a site that focuses on the construction of logical arguments supporting various political and non-political views.

I'd like for the system to allow for continued refinement of arguments on various topics and to allow for various branching of thought. That is, I'm not looking for a democracy that rewards majoritarian thought and punishes less popular but logically consistent argumentation.

As an end product, if I'm discussing, say, gun control with someone, I should be able to give them a URL: http://www.xyz3323499.com/crusso/gun_control/ and all of the arguments and important information that I have upvoted, added to, or edited would show up.

Most of this stems out of my frustration with the tedious nature of arguments on the internet. New stories stir up old arguments. Forums like HN tend to rehash all those old arguments with often little thought for the mountains of arguments/evidence already out there. Rather than have new stories refine or even change arguments and their conclusions, most people on the internet just chase their tails in circles.

I'd view this kind of site as a "let's stand on each others' shoulders and provide our shoulders to others" kind of work. With a decent web of trust, I should be able to look at the arguments of the most "respected" members of the site and mix-in their arguments with my own.

I think that a sufficiently complex web of trust would allow for fundamentally different viewpoints on a given issue to thrive because the spheres of supporters of those viewpoints have different value systems. Even with those different value systems, it should be possible at some point to pick out the thought leaders across different spheres that transcend typical Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Theist, Atheist labels with arguments that are acknowledged across the board as being internally consistent and factually based.

Yeah, I realize that I've rambled -- but if someone finds value in the idea and runs with it, I'd love to see it out there.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#103
MOBA sports. That means DOTA or League of Legends style Soccer, Football, baseball, any team sport, really.

Baseball probably wouldn't work, but soccer would be fabulous.

- 5 on 5 with 10 minute halves, every player on the field is a real person.

- Pay to unlock famous players and skins

- Just bring FIFA controls over to a multiplayer game.

- Players can form their own teams and play on ladders.

- Start it in Brazil, then translate to other languages.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#104
post #89

Okay, a bunch of ideas. Probably nothing as good as my last one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7542610 ), which was meh to begin with (but I'm happy to see that it sparkled a bit of interest). #1) An anonymous blogging platform. A site that obviously doesn't log you, and that allow you to publish posts without having them attached to an username. Since many would like to somehow post under the same handle, bu…

A buddy of mine built #1 once - dont think it really took off though...

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#105
post #19

Fix podcasts. I was helping someone set up her android phone for podcasts and noticed how problematic the whole process is. First, the android apps aren't very good. More problematic is the process of getting a feed into it. Sometimes searching by name works. Often it doesn't. Getting from podcast's website to the app is a problem. Discovery is also quite poor.

Throwing in a mention for PodKicker[1], since you mentioned searching/discovery. The UI needs a lot of work, but it is nice to have the search engine built-in (they claim an index of 250,000), instead of trying to grab RSS links from a podcast's homepage. The search itself is even available as a separate app[2]. [1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.podkicker [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/d…

That's the one I use and helped her get started with.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#106
post #95

Open source US tax filing application. Basically TurboTax but free.

I think this is a really great idea that could save a lot of poor people a lot of money. It made me think if this recent article from the NY Times. http://goo.gl/IjeL0I - People are paying $400 and more for really simple tax returns.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#107
post #46
post #19

Fix podcasts. I was helping someone set up her android phone for podcasts and noticed how problematic the whole process is. First, the android apps aren't very good. More problematic is the process of getting a feed into it. Sometimes searching by name works. Often it doesn't. Getting from podcast's website to the app is a problem. Discovery is also quite poor.

Most free podcast android apps are pretty terrible, but PocketCast (paid) is really awesome (at least it have a great UI). I don't even listen to podcast that often, but I bought it without hesitation. But it's true that there's a problem with podcast, so take my +1.

I've been using BeyondPod for a couple years now. It has a paid and free one and the free one has suited my needs, but its a relatively cheap upgrade for some nice features.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#108
post #54

I had a small discussion about this idea[1] and I believe that it is worthwhile: Make private key based authentication useful for logging in to websites. I don't have the chops but introducing private key based auth as an extra can be very worthwhile for some users. So start there and improve the UI until your grandmother can use it. I believe the biggest hurdle will be private key management. The advantage of using…

Steve Gibson is working on a system called "SQRL" that does exactly that, and should be very usable: https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

edit: forgot some words

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#109
post #102

I'd like to see a site that focuses on the construction of logical arguments supporting various political and non-political views. I'd like for the system to allow for continued refinement of arguments on various topics and to allow for various branching of thought. That is, I'm not looking for a democracy that rewards majoritarian thought and punishes less popular but logically consistent argumentation. As an end pr…

Maybe something like http://www.riyarchy.com/issue?title=Euthanasia or http://www.crystaltower.co/welcome ?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#110
post #94
post #60

We like experiments and this is a good one that goes to HN's core. Also, "Idea Sunday" is a great name. I don't see why there shouldn't be a thread like this every Sunday, as long as the quality is good. If there aren't enough new good ideas, we can reduce the frequency. Consider yourselves challenged! If it is to become a regular thing, we'll ask the whoishiring account to post them. That's the only account allowed…

What I'd love to see is some kind of "meta" HN where all the ask HN, show HN and similar threads are posted. For two reasons: 1) those "meta" threads might gather to a different audience and 2) many people are more interested in normal threads, and many are interested in the meta. One could just go ahead and create a site for that, but obviously it wouldn't have the same traction as HN, and 99% of the value of HN is…

And one for bitcoin! And one for nodejs! And x, and y and z! You know what, let's put them in a subdirectory, like so: /h/bitcoin or /h/meta. And we call them sub-HNs!

...

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