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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#71

Post by ericabiz »

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…

Would something like this fix that issue? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/chargekey-for-iphone-and-...

I backed this on Indiegogo and received it a few weeks ago. It is quite small.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#72

Post by bequanna »

When an HN post is popular, we sometimes crash small websites/blogs.

How about a URL Shortener that caches the page at the time the shortened URL is created?

Then, when the short url is used, the service attempts to reach the site, if it fails, automatically inform user & redirect them to cached page.

Or, the service can attempt to reach the page periodically (once/ couple minutes), if fails, redirect all users to cached page until next attempt in a couple minutes. This period can be based on number of users clicking on the url. Once the link is no longer very popular, the service will have a fairly long time between attempts.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#74

Post by ethnomusicolog »

syerram2 wrote: post #13
ethnomusicolog wrote: post #6

Every sunday: Product Idea: a gmail app that shows me a graph with the number of mail I sent/receive a day , by person, group,...

I signed up for goconspire.com a while back - it does a decent job at that (weekly/daily email stats)

Thanks, just signed up. I'll have to wait to see what it can do.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#75

Post by iamben »

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?

Or a strong magnetic connector every 10 or so inches to allow you to build a cable as long as you like? (I have no idea if that's actually possible)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#76

Post by callmeed »

Calendars & Events as a Service (aka "Stripe for Calendars")

I'm sick of dealing with scheduled events, timezones, future background jobs, etc. in almost every app I build. I want a service with an elegant API and nice libraries that would let me:

* Create multiple calendars (it would have an ID I could then save with my user model or whatever)

* Add events to a calendar by just passing it a timestamp and other metadata

* Have webhooks that get called any time an event starts/stops (possibly also X minutes before)

* Nice API calls for getting all a calendar's events, checking free/busy times, specifying time zone output and strftime formatting, etc.

* A JS library for outputting pretty calendars to an HTML page

* An additional cron-like feature for each calendar allowing you to define recurring webhooks

If anyone wants to give something like this a shot, let me know. I'll be your first customer, partner or angel investor.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#77

Post by DanBC »

aspidistra wrote: post #67
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?

Yes, i mean a separate product that will integrate with whatever bit of office software you're using.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#78

Post by metaobject »

DanBC wrote: post #56

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.

If you're interested in seeing one implementation in action check out the one SGI created for the Irix OS back in the 90s (or early 2000s?). Also, the scene at the end of Jurassic Park where the little girl is activating the park's electrical system shows it in action.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#79

Post by aragot »

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.

That's creative enough to have potential to win the game of AI.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#80

Post by mjadobson »

Hosted PostgreSQL service with exposed HTTP API and ACL/validation hooks. Also syncing hooks to plug into SQLite/iDB/etc for offline apps.

Sort of like Cloudant/Firebase but using relational db.

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