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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#51

Post by danfrost »

makmanalp wrote: post #28
danfrost wrote: post #16

Social Researching: Like social bookmarking, combined with joining comments so you can share and collaborate on your research. Think "trails" from V Bush's "As we may think" article, implemented so we can collaborate. As users start bookmarking things in their own trail, the app works out what other trails are similar and suggests you merge your researching efforts.

Google wave was great for almost this, actually, minus the matching / merging part! Sad to see it go.

Yes. I think this idea is almost in many things but you need to give the user the structure to both read and contribute to a thread of research.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#52

Post by pmorici »

DanBC wrote: post #39

Lower ligature risk USB charging cables. These would be used by mental health hospitals to allow (risk assessed) patient to charge their devices without introducing ligature risk. To go along with this: Bulk USB charger. Imagine a 20 port USB hub, but this has no USB connectivity. It only has USB power. It would be kept in a secure place in a mental health ward and would allow them to charge patient's devices. This w…

wouldn't it just be a matter of using a shorter cable like 4" or less?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#53

Post by hpvic03 »

Unai wrote: post #17

A crowd-sourced (á la Wikipedia) AI platform to create a chatbot (á la Siri) , with a nice user-friendly front-end, so users can input de "inputs and answers". I guess that with time it could be improved with APIs and better algorithms.

I'm really interested in chatbots, though it seems the underlying state of the art is still pretty poor.

Mitsuku (http://www.mitsuku.com/) won the Loebner Prize last year, and that chatbot still runs on basic AIML files.

I think a new approach is probably necessary to take chatbots to the next level, but I don't know what it is.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#54

Post by Bootvis »

I had a small discussion about this idea[1] and I believe that it is worthwhile:

Make private key based authentication useful for logging in to websites. I don't have the chops but introducing private key based auth as an extra can be very worthwhile for some users. So start there and improve the UI until your grandmother can use it.

I believe the biggest hurdle will be private key management. The advantage of using private keys for authenticating with web services that if the keys become unrecoverable the keys can actually changed by the service provider (after sufficient diligence).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7553882

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#55

Post by throwaway_yy2Di »

Offline navigation map for mobile. Small thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171919

The entire OpenStreetMap dataset is 23 GiB with moderate compression. With some optimization/truncuation the whole world should fit comfortably on most phones.

This is very useful, for the times you're lost with a slow connection, no connection, in a foreign country, or with roaming charges.

Also it's a fun algorithm-heavy challenge even if you don't finish anything.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#56

Post by DanBC »

3D file managers, using Occulus Rift or similar, especially if it has REZ-like interface.

This website has a bunch of 3D interfaces. They'd have to be brought up to date. And perhaps the various metaphors need a lot of work.

I don't think this will be particularly useful. I jist want something that makes me feel like I'm living in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#57

Post by arsey »

netcan wrote: post #19

Fix podcasts. I was helping someone set up her android phone for podcasts and noticed how problematic the whole process is. First, the android apps aren't very good. More problematic is the process of getting a feed into it. Sometimes searching by name works. Often it doesn't. Getting from podcast's website to the app is a problem. Discovery is also quite poor.

Maybe just the idea of podcasts is broken. RSS has dying a slow death for quite some time. Why not just build a better podcast?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#58

Post by FLUX-YOU »

omarhegazy wrote: post #8

A pay-to-post/view social discussion site. Reddit starts out cool, then slowly becomes 'dumber' (discussion-focused articles turn into quick reaction images) as it becomes more and more popular. Hacker News avoids this by purposefully not trying to be as popular as Reddit -- UI remains minimal, tries to stay out of search engines' ways, etc. But, in this way, HN is discussion focused through obscurity. What if you fi…

Instead of cash, use a cryptocurrency. Dogecoin fits perfectly with this.

As an aside, I'd like to see a torrent site that uses a cryptocurrency model to control access/leeching/improve seeding. I'd rather fry an ethernet card than a GPU!

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#59

Post by sferoze »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#60

Post by dang »

We like experiments and this is a good one that goes to HN's core. Also, "Idea Sunday" is a great name.

I don't see why there shouldn't be a thread like this every Sunday, as long as the quality is good. If there aren't enough new good ideas, we can reduce the frequency. Consider yourselves challenged!

If it is to become a regular thing, we'll ask the whoishiring account to post them. That's the only account allowed to make recurring posts like this, which solves the problem of users competing to do it for the karma. Maybe rokhayakebe can keep posting these for another few weeks and, if it's still going strong, we can semi-formalize it then.

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