Ask HN: Share an idea? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#41

Post by robzyb » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:49 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #39

robzyb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a bad idea from a counter-party risk perspective. But I suppose so did AirBnB.

Everyone says AirBnB was a bad idea, but only the original idea was bad. Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

> Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

No, thats exactly why I'd say it was a bad idea, because who would accept that outsourced risk?!

(It turns out a lot of people did)

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#42

Post by rayalez » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:49 AM UTC

rayalez wrote: post #29

- Startup: create a universal and convenient micropayment system that would allow content creators(writers, comics-artists, video creators) to monetize their content. The problem now is that current systems suck, and each website has it's own, so that it's not convenient for users to pay for content, they have to enter credit card, or go to paypal, etc. There should be a nice embeddable button that allows users to pa…

Other stuff:

- All text editors on android suck. My god they suck so much. Create something like Editorial, and you have my money.

- Not sure of it exists - betting website. Allow people to deposit money and make small bets. Make it convenient for reddit users, so when 2 people are arguing they could bet on a thing and see what will happen. Or target it to fanfiction readers, to bet on what will happen in the following chapters(would be super useful for /r/HPMOR)

- Website - a collection of ways to make people's lives weirder. Something like pranks, or ways to mess with people's heads, but harmless, funny, and innocent. Stuff that Harry from HPMOR does.

- Use ML and CV and image recognition to do something cool with google maps. It's just an interesting idea, use CV to analyze google maps data.

- Subreddit recommendation engine. Based on your likes and subscriptions. Like on imdb.

- gitter for subreddits. Connect a subreddit to a chat.

- HN-lore. There are some links that are submitted to HN regularly, and every 6 months new people discover them. Great stories people here like sharing, articles, books, etc. Create a ranked list of HN folklore and traditions.

- Automatically compile my HN, reddit, other social media posts into a blog-like post feed.

- Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for movies and animation projects. It would be a big kill-Hollywood kind of startup, not sure about how to make this at all, but we should turn movie industry into a github/reddit-like thing. Just a dream I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#43

Post by dulse » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:51 AM UTC

1) A lightweight CRM for friends. I'd love a tool that takes the teachings of someone like Keith Ferrazzi and builds a simple tool around making it much easier for me to be a better networker. Facebook doesn't quite get the use cases right, and neither does linkedin, and other CRMs are too heavy weight to be practical. Maybe with tips on managing my professional networking life in addition to my individual relationships (eg, suggest among my network a group of 4 that would make a good dinner party, and see that I haven't done a dinner party in a while and suggest to send an invite to the group). Or, tell it a handful of aspirational goals (work at Google, start a company, go to YC) and have it suggest a path to get closer to that goal by probing my network, discreetly connect me to others with similar or complimentary goals, suggest when I can help someone that has a goal that's close to my expertise, etc.

2) It would be really cool to get the 'magic' of the command line into the hands of everyday people that don't even know what it is. Magic sort of does with with SMS. I'd love to see an app toy that you totally interact with by emailing it. Then you could email it for all sorts of automated things -- :bcc the app to log data, send it an email for reminders, simple commands could be parsed and understood. It wouldn't have to do a bunch of NLP at first, you could be strict about how the data needs to be formatted for it to work.

3) This one is nebulous, but I think software discovery for the enterprise is really broken right now. There is still WAY too much outbound phone sales and old fashion 'network' selling going on. There should be some place I could go as, say, a sales ops manager to check out the best software eating the uses cases for sales operations (Ambition, BaseCRM, Yesware, etc etc). Maybe it's product hunt style group voting. Maybe it's a curated, impartial look into the 'stacks' of the industry companies that are considered 'best in class'. Maybe it's something looking at Google trend data and finding 'momentum' sort of like Mattermark. Maybe it's a 'pagerank' style connection map by looking at VC investors and the 'client' pages of startups. I dunno the best way to get good information that scales and nimbly identifies new ideas when they emerge, but if you figured out that problem you'd be solving a huge, very real problem and be in the middle of what will be billions of dollars in $ shifting around in the next 10-20 years. Search like Google works when you already know what you want, but it's really hard to distinguish the signal and noise with all the new tech and tools and toys emerging to take over different use cases for large companies. And the people in the large companies that need to know this information often don't have enough time to do the research or even where to begin.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#44

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:52 AM UTC

andymurd wrote: post #36

danieltillett wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer here is likely to be planning restrictions. The other problem is wind is actually more efficient when centralised. The large turbines that our PM hates so much are much more efficient than small turbines.

Agreed on both points. With planning restrictions, I hope that something small and noise-free could please the nimbyists. Something(s) the size of a Dyson fan on the roof-line would look cool. With regards efficiency, I think it's not about replacing the large centralised turbines but augmenting the house's existing solar. A typical single solar panel that generates 200w peak makes about 500Wh/day (on sunny days). If…

My memory is a bit hazy on this, but I think that turbines place a lot of stress on buildings that they were not designed to handle. Retrofitting the required strength into the building will be expensive given what our tradies charge.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#45

Post by jqm » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:55 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #40

jqm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is there are only a few areas in the world climate suitable for commercial almond farming. Among them Spain, areas of Australia and California (which produces most of the worlds almonds). Move the Alfalfa first. It uses in sum more California water than almonds and you can grow it in many locations. Incidentally, the idea of growing almonds indoors is just plain nuts:) You would have to have a lot of…

The areas that are suitable is a function of the price. If the Californian Almond industry runs out of water then other more marginal areas will become viable.

They require a certain climate. That's why they aren't already being commercially planted in other places which they would be at current high prices if commercial production in those places were viable.

The media like to beat up on California nuts. But really, the largest and most unnecessary user of California water is Alfalfa. That is the low hanging fruit (no pun intended) in water savings.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#46

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 4:57 AM UTC

robzyb wrote: post #41

danieltillett wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says AirBnB was a bad idea, but only the original idea was bad. Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea.

> Once you realise that the business is really about running illegal hotels where the risk is outsourced then it becomes a very good idea. No, thats exactly why I'd say it was a bad idea, because who would accept that outsourced risk?! (It turns out a lot of people did)

The original idea was for people to share their home or room to strangers. This was not a good idea, but pivoting into the illegal hotel business where the properties are continually rented was a good idea - at least until there is a major crackdown.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#47

Post by jqm » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 5:13 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #30

rlease wrote: post #23

1) An application that connects restaurant chefs and managers to local farmers. Local farmers could upload their goods for the week on a marketplace board, and chefs could find things that they would like to cook with for the week and buy them. Typically chefs meet local purveyors at farmer's markets, but for small enough producers, it would save them time and money to just have their goods bought directly without ha…

1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else) can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests. This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the market and they know how much they…

Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups (churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#48

Post by gamegoblin » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 5:17 AM UTC

sohailk wrote: post #31

gamegoblin wrote: post #26

Shazam for fonts. Point your phone camera at some text and it tells you the top N fonts it thinks it is with C% confidence. Niche market for graphic designers. There's the website What The Font [1], but it's not a super user friendly app like Shazam. I think the hardest part of this would be the huge amount of time it'd take to get a good dataset and train whatever machine learning model you'd probably wind up using.…

dataset could be provided through google fonts maybe. you'd need to replicate a few iphone camera quality versions for each font though. any links for machine learning images? I could give this a go.

Unfortunately, google fonts is far too small a font set to be useful for a hardcore graphic designer.

It would be useful for "Here is a free font on google fonts that looks similar to whatever you are looking at".

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#49

Post by gamegoblin » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 5:20 AM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #33

gamegoblin wrote: post #26

Shazam for fonts. Point your phone camera at some text and it tells you the top N fonts it thinks it is with C% confidence. Niche market for graphic designers. There's the website What The Font [1], but it's not a super user friendly app like Shazam. I think the hardest part of this would be the huge amount of time it'd take to get a good dataset and train whatever machine learning model you'd probably wind up using.…

Nice idea. I think you will find the hardest thing will be that so many typefaces are near clones of each other. It might be easier to just match to the closest open source typeface.

Definitely true. That's why you'd have to print out the top N fonts it thinks it's similar to.

Something like

    1. Foo Bar Lite Italic - 99.1%
    2. Foo Bar Italic - 97.2%
    3. Baz Bar Lite Italic - 97.0%
    4. Foo Baz Italic - 95.4%
    ... etc maybe give the top 10 or so ...

Another problem is many logos and whatnot have been hand-tweaked from their original font.

Re: Ask HN: Share an idea?

#50

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 6:10 AM UTC

jqm wrote: post #47

danieltillett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else) can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests. This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the market and they know how much they…

Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups (churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.

Yes it could really be expanded outside of the just the restaurant business. Having once had a garden where I grew my own heritage produce I really, really, really miss the quality of those crops - the taste was just fantastic. I now live in an apartment and would pay a significant premium to get someone to supply them to me again.

One final tweak would be to allow people to also select organic growers as well - I personally would not care, but I suspect it would be a big market for this.