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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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421–430 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#421

Post by einhverfr »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #248
raldi wrote: post #44

A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message: +------------------------------------+ | 4,376 people received this message | | | | [Cool, it was ] [It was a waste] | | [important and] [of my time to ] | | [worthy of our] [ read this ] | | [ time ] [ message ] | | | +-------…

Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their bosses emails as a waste of time. Also in large corporations a lot of long emails will be sent that relate to company policies etc that nobody reads in practice but the purpose of the email is that it protects the company in the event that an employee says they were not aware of policy X.

I think you have two issues here. The first is that in a larger business there are a significant number of messages that get sent out as a matter of corporate policy that don't get the attention management thinks they should. Quite possibly email is not the best approach to these, but telling management that the email was a waste of time is going to make no friends, especially if there are legal reasons for the announcements.

The second problem is that there are managers who do send out de facto spam and probably could use the feedback.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#423

Post by cglee »

odesk for physical low/no skill physical labor. Some things just require muscle: moving, yardwork, lifting large furniture, etc. Would be nice to be able to see who's near you and hirable on an hourly basis. Bonus points for verified background checks, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#424

Post by dabernathy89 »

sunir wrote: post #410
callmeed wrote: post #364

API documentation tool: If you have a REST(ish) API, the tool would allow you to: * Describe the authentication * Enter all the objects, methods, URL endpoints, and parameters of your API The tool would then: * Generate pretty documentation, including example requests/responses * Include a working web-based API console (like Mashery has) * Auto-generates client libraries in Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Obj-C, etc. and ke…

Like http://apiary.io ?

Holy crap, that looks fantastic.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#425

Post by edvinmemet »

Crowdbetting/Crowdtrading (etc)

A sports betting website that uses crowdsourcing to make the best bets. As a user, you predict the outcome of some match, but your final bet isn't necessarily what you chose, but what the crowd data indicates is the best bet.

Much like the CIA found crowdsourcing to be very effective in forecasting global events (http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...), I think there's a good chance you could successfully crowdsource things such as betting on sport results.

The way the CIA thing works, I assume (the article doesn't get into much detail), is you have 3,000 people, you ask them to make some predictions, and in the end you select the top 1%. When you compare the future predictions of these top forecasters with those of CIA analysts, you find that the average Joes tend to be more correct (even though they have less information than the CIA analysts).

So you can do something similar with sports betting. You have a group of top forecasters and their predictions for some game assume some probability distribution (like, 30% bet on the home side, and so on). By comparing this distribution with the average odds set by the major brokers, you can identify where the odds have been set incorrectly (according to your crowd) and exploit these weaknesses. For example, let's say that your crowd says that the odds of the Away team winning should be 2:1, but the brokers set the odds at 4:1. Then, this would be a good bet to place, assuming the crowd is 'more right' than the brokers.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#426

Post by Jonovono »

mrlase wrote: post #279
sparkie wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A way to organize anything at all would be a nice start. The real problem is people trying to force arbitrary relationships into hierarchical models always results in mediocre solutions. When are we going to start taking graph databases seriously? (+ Graph filesystems)

I'm really interested in this idea as I suffer from the same problem on my local disk in addition to having years worth of documents across a DropBox account, SkyDrive, and two Google Drive accounts. What are your biggest gripes? What model would you like to see? A tag based filesystem? Arbitrary graph? Would love to talk to people such as yourself who have this problem.

I am working on a project to categorise your files/code projects. You can give them tags, comments, and then sort them in that way. I want to see something like this for any type of data, and I think graph databases would be a good thing to explore!

It's not quite done, and I will be making demo videos eventually but if you are curious check it out!

https://github.com/Jonovono/um

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#427

Post by rahilsondhi »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #362
rahilsondhi wrote: post #79

A website for employees in a company to share SQL queries and their results, like Heroku Dataclips. You can write your query in your browser, the results will be shown, and you can just copy/paste the URL to a coworker for him/her to see the results. I'm already working on this, contact me if you're interested!

Rahil, have you thought about extending this idea to a place where you would post a DB schema and SQL queries and let the community optimize it. Companies will use this to tap into the expertise of many database engineers.

This sounds pretty out of scope for what I'm thinking of.

I'm trying to solve the problem of people sharing data within an organization. I'm not trying to make a social community of database engineers.

Cool idea though! Feel free to contact me if you'd like to chat more.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#428

Post by lixon »

jw2013 wrote: post #42

Many people on hacker news have explicitly asked for this: a platform for listing your open-source project that needs contributors. I tried here: https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.

http://collabfinder.com/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#429

Post by lukeholder »

perlgeek wrote: post #125
salgernon wrote: post #5

Waiforpaperback.com Informs you when alternatives printings are available could monetize by showing similar titles in monthly summary emails

I've been thinking about a much more general idea recently: basically twitter, but for data (in JSON format), not just text. A company could simply announce all new publications, and you could subscribe to that stream, filtering for paperback (and possibly authors you are interested in). Of course, there are hundreds of alternative use cases. (Interested in doing the project with me? drop me an email moritz@faui2k3.o…

so rss?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#430

Post by lukeholder »

josephjrobison wrote: post #400

Uber for delivery via drones. Kind of reaching, and I know it's not practical yet, but the general concept is cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Uber did it themselves first since they have a knack for trying weird delivery stuff like ice cream or flowers or whatever. You would open your Uberish app, punch in the weight of what you need delivered and where to deliver it to, it would give you an estimate, and come to yo…

so http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011 ?
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