Ask HN: Idea Sunday

coMarketing: I would like to see a solution that allows smaller companies that target a similar audience to be able to put their "little" marketing dollar together and have a better chance at fighting the big guy.

Phone screen on my computer: When I am at my desk, I want to be able to use my phone from my computer. I can use the desktop interface to go through contacts, check feeds, answer texts, and even forward calls to my desk phone.

Conversation blog: A blogging platform that is based on discussion. Each blog post is a conversation between two or more people, let us stop the monologues because in real life to hear two is more interesting than one.

Alarm Band: A simple band that wakes me up with a buzz, but I just want to spend $25 for it.

PHP wrapper: I began to write a simple consistency wrapper for PHP, but I never finished. Basically it a class that gives me a clear structure on how to pass parameters for functions. I ALWAYS know to do function something (haystack, needle) then the wrapper rearranges according to the actual function requirement.

Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a few hours in? I know I have and it's a pain!

A well built knowledge map that would graph the relationships between different topics in a field would help alleviate this problem. Take for example linear algebra. You've heard about this fancy thing called singular value decomposition but barely know what a matrix is. You type SVD into a search box, and it generates a breadth first tree with all the topics you need to know to be able to understand SVD up to a certain depth. And then you just work from the leafs that you do understand up to the topic you are interested. This saves hours or sometimes days of just trying to understand the ordering in which you should be learning things. It essentially builds a curriculum for the user on the fly for a topic they are interested.

I would propose this as a community wiki so knowledge maps could be crowdsourced and curated as they would be time consuming and difficult to build for a single person. Would also suggest adding the ability to let users create accounts and mark off topics they feel confident they know.

Potential problems: The two big problems with this idea are 1) generating a proper knowledge map: There will be ambiguities in the edges and even the nodes of a map. Sometimes (often) you will need to be clever how you organize the information. For example, your have a dependency listing like: Matrix 2) a topics can be studied in different frameworks: E.g. linear algebra can be studied with or without using vector spaces. Once again, deciding how to create the knowledge graph will be difficult.

Solution: Have multiple types of edges. You can have edges to signify hard dependencies, soft dependencies, generalizations, and extensions. Maybe other types of edges. You will still need to be clever, but having a way to signify the relationship between topics will help resolve the problem.

You and others on voice chat were in a 'virtual' room and the sound was stereo/volume adjusted accordingly.

I remember that when people misbehaved on group voice chat we used to "put them in the corner"

It didn't map to the game environment but the execution was pretty nice; I fear that, if you use the game's physics, you'll quickly realize why radio-comm became such a thing

More seriously, what would this IDE have in it?

Have you seen Scrivener? That's what many of my friends both in academia and in fiction use. What does it have that you would expect otherwise?

https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard

but for all knowledge?