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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#291

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #231
genericsteele wrote: post #30

Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations. It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with one person asking a question, and another offering three funny answers, plus a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a good comeback is rehearsing a bunch o…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#292

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #231
genericsteele wrote: post #30

Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations. It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with one person asking a question, and another offering three funny answers, plus a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a good comeback is rehearsing a bunch o…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#293

Post by msvan »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #130

Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor sticked with us for that long. I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is with a diagram. http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak... You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to blanch vegetables. Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need b…

For some reason, I find this idea hilarious. It's a great rethinking of the recipe model. It's also a typical engineer idea; it's the kind of idea few people in my environment would come up with.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#294

Post by 56yards »

manish_gill wrote: post #140

This might be fairly simple, but I can't find a good solution - A replacement for Google Groups. More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client? For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough either. Goog…

I'm currently working on a Google groups/Google plus alternative for communicating and sharing information between one another. It's very early beta stages at the moment but maybe worth you checking out https://honbu.io

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#295

Post by granttimmerman »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #130

Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor sticked with us for that long. I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is with a diagram. http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak... You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to blanch vegetables. Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need b…

I'm working on an idea that does this but is more generic than just cooking. Look out for the public beta in September.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#296

Post by hershel »

1. Combining the mio water flavoring , which gets very good reviews in his category ,into a cap of a reusable water bottle ,similar to pillid[2]

2. Pcb layout design, in the electronics industry, is somewhat similar to games like pipes. So why not gamify pcb layout[3] ?

3. Recently i read some interesting research about some electronic circuit. It would have been very useful to get access to a full diagram/layout and a module to buy and play with.

[2]http://store.nalgene.com/product-p/pillid.htm

[3]http://www.chipestimate.com/blogs/IPInsider/?p=2126

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#297

Post by fest »

yankoff wrote: post #281
fest wrote: post #276

Ordering prototype (3d printing, CNC machining, lasercutting) parts, reimagined. It's a major pain just to get a few parts made- first you find a company that does that, e-mail them their design, they get back to you with a quote and you either accept it or go back to step 1. What if you could just upload your design, select a material from catalogue and receive an instant quote. If you're happy with it, order the pa…

There are services like that. Check out https://www.ponoko.com

Exactly like this (sad smile).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#298

Post by hershel »

rdl wrote: post #290

A tablet (iPad or Android) game which is designed to be used while exercising. Use ANT or Bluetooth 4.0LE to tie into a treadmill, bike, or other exercise equipment to get output measurements (speed); ideally, find some devices which allow two way commands (not common at all right now). Networked games against other people, or vs. computer or past personal performance. The interesting part is a "use while running" in…

http://toshnology.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/goji-play-making-30...

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#299

Post by geuis »

egypturnash wrote: post #190

Basically Yelp for transgender surgeons. I've been working on making the decision as to who I'll get to sculpt new genitals for me, and researching this on the web is a mess - every site comparing them is out of date, triggers my mental sketchy spam site detectors, or both. It'd be great to be able to go to a nice-looking site and say "all I'm interested in right now is MtF genital surgery", then see doctors who do t…

In all honesty, I think you need to spend more time talking with people that have undergone similar decisions in the past than worrying about building a website. Other people will directly tell you about their doctors and help you choose from there.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#300

Post by akg_67 »

keithwarren wrote: post #59

RAID Arrays for online storage services. So many services offer a free tier, maybe 5gb for free and then you pay after that. Some are much higher. Build sort of a proxy to these services so that you have a distributed and large free online storage system. This was an idea my team had last year when we were looking closely at a photo organization and management startup. We had won a startup competition, had investors…

NASUNI http://www.nasuni.com started out with the same idea but now has become much bigger focused on enterprise market. As a Storage Product Manager managing a Storage Virtualization software product over a decade ago, I researched this idea. Also, my first startup was addressing similar problem - consolidation of unused storage space within a geographically dispersed enterprise. Both happened before "cloud" term became popular and S3 wasn't even a service.

Technically, it is a difficult problem to solve if the product need to be software based, simple, transparent and targeted at consumer market so that user can install on their laptops/workstations. The product will need to sit in the middle and capture every operation between OS and DropBox, GDrive, and OneDrive etc. It is not a trivial problem to solve.

A solution that uses a target storage device on a network which in the background sync with different online storage service providers is a better alternative and that is what NASUNI and a few others pursued. But now you are in consumer/SMB storage hardware business. Another better solution option is for users to only install one piece of software (ex: OwnCloud) which uploads to one cloud and then sync with other services in the background. Overall, my impression is that online storage providers offer very little support for such services that try to consolidate storage from different service providers.

On business side, it will be very difficult to make money of people who want to consolidate "free" space from different services. Such people are inherently cheap and wouldn't pay for your service either. So this will lead you to target SMB/enterprise market where typical mindset is to use one service like S3, Box, or Dropbox. So your value proposition has to change from distributed and large online storage system to redundancy, disaster recover, data access and data protection. Such solutions still have the single point of failure - your service. You will need to somehow need to be overcome.

Overall, I believe it is a good idea in principle, figuring out a business model, distribution and customer discovery may be a larger challenge.

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