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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#61

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #55

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-he…

Do you mean navigation as in "routing" or just as in "viewable map"? If the latter, MapsWithMe does a good job of it already.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#62

Post by roryokane »

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…

The social discussion site MetaFilter uses part of this idea already. It requires users to pay $5 once before they are allowed to post anything (http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi). But it does not charge or pay its users after that.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#63

Post by DanBC »

Google Spellcheck.

Google must have terabytes of data about correct, alternative, international, and incorrect spelling of English words. (Also probably all words in other languages).

A Google spell checker product could combine knowledge of word placement within a sentence and this huge cache of data to accurately guess what the correct spelling should be.

The product could probably go further and help people avoid eggcorns and malapropisms and etc.

It would be interesting to compare the accuracy : size ratio of this dictionary with that created by rtm and father using probabilistic, uhm, stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#65

Post by justinhj »

graublau wrote: post #38
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.

On iOS it's not much better, most apps are too granualar (e.g. Downcast) or not enough (Apple Podcasts). Pegging some hope on http://overcast.fm/ fixing the situation but it's not a great ecosystem...yet.

The built in iOS podcast app is the worst app I've ever used. It's not that it fails to be great, it actually seemed to go out of its way to delete podcasts just before I left home. I bought downcast and I'm happy with it except for the problem of discovering podcasts.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#67

Post by aspidistra »

DanBC wrote: post #63

Google Spellcheck. Google must have terabytes of data about correct, alternative, international, and incorrect spelling of English words. (Also probably all words in other languages). A Google spell checker product could combine knowledge of word placement within a sentence and this huge cache of data to accurately guess what the correct spelling should be. The product could probably go further and help people avoid…

Google Chrome and the Google Toolbar already have spellcheckers ... ?

Or do you mean something more like MS Word, which will correct misplaced letters and so on?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#69

Post by DanBC »

pmorici wrote: post #52
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?

Well, the cables have to be really robust so nothing can be extracted from them that could be used for cutting.

Some people can cause surprising damage with a bobby pin so having robust, potted, cable shells would be important.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#70

Post by bri3d »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #55

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-he…

While offline navigation is increasingly an edge case I do agree that it offers vast utility in the situations where it's still necessary.

Nokia's HERE Drive+ offers this as its headlining feature on Windows Phone, and Windows Phone comes with offline mapping support built in (to be downloaded on a region-by-region basis).

I think the most challenging part of offline mapping is honestly geocoding. Decent vector data for streets is easily available thanks to OSM and learning how to render it and do routing is a fun path down learning well-known algorithms. When you think about it, you're basically reimplementing early 2000s standalone navigation systems like TomTom.

But even once I've implemented rendering and routing (and reached early 2000s TomTom parity), I still can't enter "Pizza Hut" and end up at the nearest Pizza Hut. This is where Google excels over other map providers and especially over the existing mobile-phone offline maps solutions like Nokia's - Google's PoI database and search facility is unmatched in my experience.

Google even solves for fun problems like locating the closest instance of an intersection between common street names like "23rd and Broadway."

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