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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#421

Post by vijayr »

Two ideas:

1. Would be labor intensive, but: a site (blog?) that talks to people/experts from various industries, quizzing them about problems they face in their daily jobs. Some of these might be solvable by software. It doesn't need to be too detailed, but it would help if it is totally outside of the usual tech stuff - the quirkier the better.

People can pick something from the blog, instead of building yet another project management app.

2. A website that asks a series of questions (skillsets, weather preferences, languages spoken, food preferences, age, educational qualifications etc) and suggests countries/cities to move to. Should also take into consideration special visa privileges (canada-us, nz-aus etc). It would be quite tough to keep the data fresh, for an app like this. but this would be immensely useful, and it can be monetized too. Even if done narrowly (ex: only for software people), it would still be very useful.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#422

Post by conorgil145 »

yaur wrote: post #356
conorgil145 wrote: post #312

I don't expect this would be a company, but rather more of an open source project. I have been thinking about this for a while, so I'll throw it up to see if there is any interest. I would really like someone to create a website full of information and resources for first time startup employees regarding stock options. It would be great if there was a calculator which would allow you to experiment with different liqu…

As hashtag mentions, a "calculator" is almost impossible... a related problem is that most of the developers that I've worked with don't even know the questions to ask. Don't have the slighted idea what common vs preferred means, what convertible debt is, or what "on a fully diluted basis" does and doesn't mean. A site to that helped people figure out what questions to ask when assessing an equity offer could be usef…

Perhaps my comment above focused too much on the details of the calculator I was envisioning. However, as I mentioned, I think the most important thing is that the calculator just act as a forcing function to introducing developers to the right questions to ask and providing them resources to explain why those concepts/terms are so important. I suppose even if there was no "calculator", a site which aggregated resources and focused on targeting startup employees would still be very useful.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#424

Post by swah »

vijayr wrote: post #421

Two ideas: 1. Would be labor intensive, but: a site (blog?) that talks to people/experts from various industries, quizzing them about problems they face in their daily jobs. Some of these might be solvable by software. It doesn't need to be too detailed, but it would help if it is totally outside of the usual tech stuff - the quirkier the better. People can pick something from the blog, instead of building yet anothe…

f(a,b,c,d,e,f) -> return "San Francisco";

(Meaning: the kind of people that would use that app would all go to the same place).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#425

Post by mmayernick »

d0m wrote: post #299

I have a hard time explaining this idea, so please bear with me. As a founder and hacker, I want to know how my users use my web and mobile apps. But I haven't found an intuitive and dead-simple way to do it. Mixpanel and google analytic are way more complex than what I have in mind. What I would like to have is more similar to Facebook, but instead of looking at my friends activity, I'd like to see what's happening…

This is the philosophy behind http://spinnakr.com. It is still a work in progress, as getting the thresholds right and making sure events are the important ones across a whole range of different sites is on ongoing effort, but I totally agree this is the way analytics should work. Right now we're just focused on traditional web analytcics but you should see user focused data soon as well.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#426

Post by hashtag »

xerophtye wrote: post #369
hashtag wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to your statement about how it could be __surprisingly accurate__, it would in fact be the opposite. There is no accurate way to build a calculator to show different liquidity outcomes because there are way too many unknown variables if you understand how stocks actually work in a given company. Everything would have to be a complete guess in the dark for the employee punching in those numbers making it near…

On the contrary, "How much does the company need to be worth for my options to be worth $X?" can be answered with a surprising amount of accuracy. Because isn't that basic mathematics with the variables "Exercise Price" and "Stock price"? I am talking about value of options for EXERCISE here, not selling them off. The selling part is what gets a little complicated, but we have ways to price them as well so a calculat…

Unfortunately no. You are making some bad assumptions here. I won't get into all the details as it can get lengthy to type out but there are numerous factors missing.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#427

Post by eddyystop »

sferoze wrote: post #59

A 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.

Check out zidisha.org. They explain why micro-financers have to charge up to 40% (!!!) interest to cover loan management costs.

They have a new, eBay-like take on micro-financing. You earn about 5% on your loan, while knowing 50% of loans will fail.

I like their concept and plan to throw a couple hundred into the wind and see what happens.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#428

Post by Stwerner »

allworknoplay wrote: post #254
zimbatm wrote: post #84

A subscription service for open source projects. As a company I would pay you monthly and get access to bug and features development for all the open source dependencies that I am using. The more I pay the more things I can get done in a month. If a feature is too big for my budget I can accumulate month to month value on a ticket or get other companies to participate.

I'm not taking a side (really!), but there's a lot to be said for keeping open source projects strong on their own without injecting cash. Cash coming in creates a disincentive to develop without cash and promotes a reliance on paid services rather than a mentality of contributing back. Also, when it comes to many projects, the organization that offers services around them has a negative incentive to contribute clear…

> Also, when it comes to many projects, the organization that offers services around them has a negative incentive to contribute clear, quality code.

I'm probably being naive, but in my version of this idea, I was thinking that contributing well-written, tested, and documented code back upstream from the company's account would be a good way to have the work that's done contribute to the marketing.

Part of the reason why I haven't moved past just talking about this idea is the possibility of it having a negative impact in terms of the original creators/maintainers, so I'm definitely interested in hearing more about this perspective on it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#429

Post by Stwerner »

th0br0 wrote: post #192
Stwerner wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to see this here, I had this idea a while back and have been discussing it with people before I go on validating/invalidating it. In my mind anyway, the idea is something like https://railslts.com/ but for potentially every other gem in your gemfile. We would provide security patches, bugfixes, features, documentation, training, version upgrade scripts/documentation and so on to subscribers. I really like…

I've also had this on my mind for quite some time. How would you actually implement things though? After all, you're essentially trying to sell "support contracts" for open source projects via the platform. You could implement these by a) "hiring" the project owner to work on specific bugs/features or b) hiring freelancers to fix requested bugs. Furthermore, how would you ... * determine the value of bugs/features? *…

I hadn't really cracked how to scale the business up, but to bootstrap it I was thinking that I would just do the work until it became too overwhelming. I haven't thought about what pricing would look like, so I don't know how feasible it would be to just hire more people as more and more work comes in - but it should have some interesting economies of scale since there is a lot of overlap in the gems used in rails projects for instance.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#430

Post by tannerj »

crusso wrote: post #102

I'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…

I had an idea for something like this during the 2008 Presidential Elections. There was so much hearsay and misdirection that I did not know where to turn when trying to decide who to vote for. My idea was more of a forum where you could somehow remove the emotional human element out of the discussions and a moderation system that would not allow posts that could not be supported by credible sources. I remember I came up with a cool name, checked Godaddy.com, saw it was taken, and abandoned the idea. I think having a repository of credible facts to turn to when you need to support a philosophical argument would be awesome. Kind of like a Snopes.com meets Wikipedia.
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