Two things I would love to see: 1. Kayak.com for ground transportation. Trains, buses, ferries, etc. are a pain to compare prices and book right now. Admittedly there probably isn't as much of a business case for this. 2. A music site where I could collaborate on a playlist with my friends and listen to the music at the same time. Currently there are sites that let you share playlists, but not listen at the same time…
Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
61–70 of 130 posts
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#62just curious: are there any intellectual property risks (with CU-Boulder)?
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#63Here's a couple: TV chat system - used to find (local?) people watching the same show you are watching and form a chat channel (on mobile phone?) Personalized news site - kind of like YC or digg but using netflix style machine learning algorithms to customize A free version of 'vault.com' (reviews on employers, salary surveys) Find a haircut (paste your picture, sort of photoshop different hair on it) Underserved sea…
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#64It occurs to me that the professor is teaching you something. Good people are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are much scarcer.
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#65What domain are you familiar with? HTML/CSS/JS? Backends? Programming IDEs? Text analysis? Surfing the web? (UIs, journalism, communities etc..)
I have some ideas.
1. Community designer - you'd start with a forum, then add features like up/down votes, ratings, tags, following, blocking, limiting length of posts (aka Twitter), anonymity, chats in threads, micro-comments (quick comments about meaty posts visually separate) topic isolation, user labels (like trolls, political, religious nuts) etc.. You could add and remove features in order to guide the community to be active, post good content, or troll like 4chan.
Of course you'd need extensive experience of wasting time on forums, digg, reddit, starting your own forum to approach this idea.
2. Code map - lots of projects have a lot of boilerplate code, multiple functions with little inside them, linking to other parts of the program for convenience. Code density map shows where the functional code is in a large project. Complexity map could show where there is long, incomprehensible logic. Dependency map showing which classes have more dependencies than others. Some of these could be documented by the developer, he can label something "hacky" and you could see how much of the code-base is "hacky" on a map. Long name API map should look different for JQuery and Google Closure (JS frameworks), would be useful for designer coders because they have low tolerance for long lines of text. Would look different for Processing.org vs Java drawing API too.
Such a map should look different from one project to the next. It might reveal coding style. Someone who is looking to work on a project could decide if the coding style matches their own without having to dig in to the code. People choosing a framework like Rails, Django could decide based on a map of example projects that do the same task. Compare how verbose one framework is vs another.
This is a hard problem with fun social implications. I don't really know how hard, but there should be some intermediate stages for the idea that would be neat, maybe even useful for github.
3. Individualized content - user takes a survey of words, concepts he understands, like helium, fusion, deuterium, megawatts, steam turbines and when looking at a news site he would only see the articles where he understands the concepts. If the news site wants to explain these concepts to the individual, they have to write specially written articles that break things down, start at the fundamentals.
It's not hard to get ideas after you have some experience, did a lot of research in a domain. As a bonus you have more motivation to work on it than you do on someone else's less familiar idea. That might be a problem for you.
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#66A CRUD application generator. You go to a page and define all of your models and basic rules. The models get defined in very simple terms - you give each model a name, and then define each field with dropdowns that define what each field is. If it's a foreign key, you select that in the dropdown. You can select validation for each field from a catalog of validations (phone number, email address, string min length of 5 chars, whatever).
Offer addins for commonly needed functionality - for example, I end up using authentication in just about every project and end up having to do a lot of work to get it up and running. So you could have plugins like authentication, private messaging (which would require auth automatically), a ticket system, whatever.
Also offer the ability to choose a theme before generating a project.
So a user can go to a site, define their models, add any addins they want and pick a theme.
Then in the final step, they choose a language and framework they want everything generated in: Python / Django, Ruby on Rails 2.3.x, Ruby on Rails 3.x, Python / Pylons, Scala / Lift, ASP.Net MVC; whatever templates you've gotten built.
When it's done, they get a compressed file (zip or tar.gz) that contains the generated application and some programatically created documentation that explains where everything is, how to change the important parts and how to deploy it.
There are lots of ways to make money with something like this:
* Charge for addins per project
* Charge for premium themes
* Charge a small amount per project (I like this option the least)
* Provide automatic hosting a la Heroku for projects - this would let people with a basic idea but no programming chops get something up in an hour or two instead of trying to find someone to explore the idea with them. For this you'd want to limit it to a subset of frameworks so that you don't have to have a lot of different production environments.
* Use a fremium model where people can generate x number of apps a month for free, but over that limitation charge some amount per month. People will try to get around this by registering with multiple email addresses if the product is good, but that's a great problem to have!
Although it sounds like you're probably somewhat freed from a profit motive while you're building this, which helps significantly. From a dev perspective it would be fun to learn enough about all the major frameworks to generate sites in them.
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#67Two things. 1. Don't worry about the idea. They tend to change a lot. Pick something that interests you, roll along with it, and if you don't like just move on to a different idea. 2. I'm a college student too. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is IP and the University. Talk to your professor about this carefully to make sure that your IP is yours and the University doesn't get any claim, just to alleviate hea…
2. The Sponsor organization (my team) gets all the rights to the products as is described in the proposal documentation "The sponsoring organization retains the rights to the resulting software. Also, sponsors may require students to sign non-disclosure agreements, as long as the agreements"
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#68What about if, instead of speculating on a business idea to implement in isolation, you found some of these industry partners, and asked them to describe something they need desperately and would pay for? If you can't do that before your proposal is due, make that research your proposal -- get familiar with the process of gathering needs and learning about a market. Deploy your team on iterating implementations, from paper sketch to running system. If you can get a customer or two to sign a non-binding letter of intent saying they'll buy your product if it does X,Y, and Z, you'll have accomplished something that's beyond most startup-oriented hackers.
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#69It'd be pretty awesome to see how a chair or painting would look in a room by getting a live rendering of the object actually in the room.
Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea
#70Hmmm. Here's a problem that I'm going to end up building a solution to if someone else doesn't do it first (and by all means, please do it because I am lazy and have enough projects to last me for the foreseeable future): A CRUD application generator. You go to a page and define all of your models and basic rules. The models get defined in very simple terms - you give each model a name, and then define each field wit…