Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#91

Post by AmberShah » Wed, Jul 07, 2010, 6:48 PM UTC

chaosmachine wrote: post #6

I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...

I think this one is awesome. I hate the teeny tiny pictures in Amazon - it does not compare to seeing books in the store. The downside is I don't really know what to search for. I like to go to a certain section (literature, programming, etc) and browse.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#92

Post by imp » Wed, Jul 07, 2010, 7:12 PM UTC

intranation wrote: post #47

At the risk of being contrary to the spirit of the thread: if no one uses it it's probably not a very good feature.

Exactly. The saying is "make something people want," not "make something you think is cool."

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#93

Post by silentbicycle » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 3:27 AM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #89

silentbicycle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs already comes with functions for that. pop-global-mark (C-x C-SPC) moves you around a global mark stack, and C-u set-mark-command (C-u C-SPC) does this locally in a buffer. (I use this hundreds of times a day.) The bookmark package (go to "Bookmarks" in the Emacs info pages) give you persistent bookmarks, with a fairly nice interface. I've written stuff in elisp only to find that it already existed in Emacs, to…

I had looked at global mark (pop-global-mark), local mark, and Bookmark but i didn't like their behaviors. Global mark (or local mark) doesn't work on buffers that have been killed. When I jump back to a quick bookmark, I want its file loaded back into memory if its buffer has been killed. Global mark doesn't work consistently. It seems to only remember the last mark set in a buffer, so it has an one mark per buffer…

Indeed. I'm no stranger to re-implementing something because no existing version was quite what I wanted, either. On rereading, my post didn't really come across like I intended.

Then again, even when implementing something that (it turns out) already exists, solving the problems that come up along the way almost always teaches one something.

And with Emacs extensions, even if you're the only one who finds it useful, it's still useful. :)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#94

Post by carnevalem » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 4:30 AM UTC

lkozma wrote: post #68

The site http://www.soundsabitlike.com probably it's not visible enough on Google or it's just me who finds song similarities interesting :)

I'm really enjoying this site. You should improve the permalink feature though. I want to share some of these comparisons with friends, but its not very easy right now.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#95

Post by Hovertruck » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 6:08 AM UTC

davidalln wrote: post #36

thegyppo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought about integrating these similar features into Chrome via a plugin? Would be fairly good to be able to search Wikipedia by typing w: in the URL bar.

You can already do this in Chrome. For example, I hit ' to search Wikipedia and hit ; to I'm Feeling Lucky Google. Preferences -> Basics -> Manage (Next to Default Search)

On top of that, most pages with a functioning search get recognized by Chrome, so for example if I type "e" and hit tab, Chrome lets me search "en.wikipedia.org".

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#96

Post by stiggz » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 3:45 PM UTC

A massively ambitious vanilla php project to collect click-through data on an advertising platform, with a dashboard, daily translation of 6gb log files into one-page screenshots for quick overview. This feature took me 2 months to program, was an awesome experience, but the company was soon bought out, and the app was eliminated in the takeover. Sad sad.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#97

Post by stiggz » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 3:48 PM UTC

An aggregator for sports scores, including a scraper which pulls data from major feeds, and sends them directly into an InDesign template for publishing setup. The same week that I finished the feature, our company corporate office decided to go with an out-of-the-box solution, still waiting to see how it will stack up.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#98

Post by Sinikway » Thu, Jul 08, 2010, 6:32 PM UTC

I built a social networking site by myself with real time chat, messaging, photo sharing, music sharing, users can post wall messages, display their public timeline tweets, create friends list. I think the reason it didn't take off is the lack of money in advertisement. I tried Google adwords but the most I spent is 50 bucks and kind of short of it. The site is http://www.jamafriend.com

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#99

Post by code_duck » Sat, Jul 10, 2010, 3:49 AM UTC

bbwharris wrote: post #78

code_duck wrote: post #40

We spent months on an in depth analytics tool for our users. Most of them don't have an idea what the data means. It's over their heads, so we missed the mark audience wise.

I've encountered this numerous times with charting data for others. I find a great top level view of some key data, but it flies over their head and it never gets used. This is probably our failure, not theirs. We can't expect our audiences to understand something the way we understand it.

Definitely, the key is to see things the way the users do, and provide only what they think they want to know. Seems like I'm stating the obvious, but doing the opposite is easier than it seems.