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.
Ask HN: Idea Sunday
111–120 of 453 posts
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#112I'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 ?
I'll have to look at them further, but what I think they might lack from what I posted is a notion that different users will value some gray area arguments differently. The system should preserve those differing value systems in the arguments constructed and use them to build upon the webs of trust. For example, user bob may find it axiomatic that "healthcare is a right". User jeff will typically downvote arguments that assume that right and not want to build his framework on top of it.
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#113A 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
#114In general, your Laptop has no idea that it's tethered and therefore data is more scarce than normal. Something that flips between "ok go for it" and "restrict these apps" would be nice, especially if it were automatic.
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#115I 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…
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#116Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#117Calendars & Events as a Service (aka "Stripe for Calendars") I'm sick of dealing with scheduled events, timezones, future background jobs, etc. in almost every app I build. I want a service with an elegant API and nice libraries that would let me: * Create multiple calendars (it would have an ID I could then save with my user model or whatever) * Add events to a calendar by just passing it a timestamp and other metad…
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#118I'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…
Different people would indeed have different value systems and also give different degrees of credence to different sources. So the goal would be to end up with a crowdsourced tree of moral & factual claims, and individual users could then decide which claims they agreed or disagreed with to come to their own conclusion on the topic.
(Look up 'argument mapping' for academic exploration of the concept).
My thinking now is that most online political arguments online are really about tribalism, not finding the truth. If you did have users who cared about the truth (and who could consider other viewpoints), you wouldn't need a fancy product: a simple web forum would suffice.
But do drop me an email at isaac@i.saac.me if you'd like to chat more.
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#119I'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…
"Voting" on the internet definitely added a lot but it created a bunch of hurdles: majoritarian thought, bubbles and averaged opinions.
Review sites like rotten tomatoes are a good example of the last one. The average opinion about a movie is nowhere near as good as asking a single person who shares my tastes in movies. A bubble would be much more useful here. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.
I think letting ideas branch might let controversial discussions get objective. Complicated can be mistaken for subjective. It also sounds like the kind of fun that can draw people in.
I really like the idea.
Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday
#120Bonus points if it has some way of verifying that passwords were actually changed and the new password is strong.