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Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#82I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...
To understand... are you expecting Google to enter every possible search term into your search box and index the results? BTW, your site _requires_ javascript = SEO fail.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#83CSS Expressions. Aka Dynamic Properties. Recently deprecated http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537634(VS.85).aspx Ironically now showing up in other browsers own extensions. Reasons for failure: * distrust of Microsoft inventions in the browser * incomplete implementation strategy based on javascript instead of custom expression parser * security issues because of using javascript instead of a custom expressi…
Add to the failure list:
* Terrible performance - practically first rule for optimizing page rendering is "don't use CSS expressions"
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_perfor...
* Only work on IE natch.
So, you have Javascript which was better performance and worked everywhere.
I think it's a little misleading to say it's the best feature no one ever used. CSS expressions were re-born as hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions - with a much better, more focused implementation, and are pretty popular these days - especially for mobile.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#84http://www.travelatlas.org/
Based on the terribly original idea of writing about your travel experiences. A couple good features (imo):
- Inherent credibility. I figured if you ask someone you meet on the street where's a good place to eat or stay - being a complete stranger - the chance of them giving you good information is about the same as flipping a coin: 50-50. So everyone starts with 50% credibility. As you write reviews and people are in agreement (via like/don't like or comments) your credibility goes up (influenced of course by the credibility of the commentor).
- Built in messaging and chat. Added some "bots" to make it look like there were actually more users at one point. The idea was to implement a parser so that you could ask someone in chat: "where's a cheap place to stay in guam?" the app would parse the query and a bot could answer with the highest rated hostel in that location for example.
- Parse search terms with ability to search by category. So if you search for "a bed to crash on" while you're in manhattan, the app prompts if you'd like to search the "lodging" category.
Reason for failure:
- Other people did it better (tripadvisor, virtual tourist, etc)
- SHOCKWAVE (although this was 2005)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#85I built a Twitter client that filters out everything in your feed except for Tweets including urls or photos. It's pretty good way of just finding the interesting stuff in your Twitter feed. http://blurl.me
Man, I wish something existed that did the opposite.
Only show me Tweets that don't include:
Photos URLs RTs Hash Tags
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#86[deleted]
Thanks for the extensive post. It sounds like you were really passionate about this website, but got a little carried away creating pet features you yourself would want. Great cautionary tale. At least you have a great portfolio piece, though!
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#87Ooh, I've got a couple. I'll just use one for an example though: http://college.mychances.net/tools/college-choice-matrix.php This tool is based on ~25,000 college applications and shows you the relative preference for each college. It's not based on direct matchups but instead based on an Elo point system, so that all colleges can be ranked along one dimension (essentially, revealed student preference). It's rarely…
Assuming you've looked into it, how impossible is it to license all of a school's admission data (i.e. every applicant's GPA, SAT, and admission status) in some anonymous format? I would have loved a tool that that would let me enter a GPA and SAT score and then using actual data could tell me that 500 students with comparable stats (like +/- 0.1 for GPA and +/- 50 for SAT) applied to school X last year and 380 were…
It's true that it would make my life a lot easier since I wouldn't have to collect this information myself from individuals. I just rely on self-reporting and statistical techniques to achieve approximate results. Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to get the full data from one school and see how close to the truth we actually get.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#88I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...
have you looked at http://picclick.com/ .. you have something, i think you're just missing the boat. Picclick has been getting a lot of traction as of late.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#89Bread Crumb for Emacs, http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net . I use it constantly everyday as I built it for myself. Judging from the download stat, not many people using it.
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 behavior. The flow seems to use global mark to jump back to a buffer, then use local marks to jump to different points in the buffer. I want just one quick bookmark system, no global or local distinction, to remember multiple points in a buffer and multiple buffers.
Mark is kind of overloaded for different purposes. Its primary use is for marking regions (for copy/cut/etc). I turn on transient-mark-mode to better highlight regions. Whenever I made a mark for quick bookmarking, the region is highlighted and have to be canceled; it's very annoying.
The Bookmark package requires assigning a name for each bookmark, entering its name to jump back to the bookmark, and deleting the name when it's not needed. It is good for permanent bookmarks but very cumbersome for quick bookmarking. I just want to set anonymous quick bookmarks and jump back to them quickly. I don't want to manage the names.
The good thing about Emacs is that if you don't like the way things are working, you can roll your own. So I did.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?
#90http://bettersoftwareprocess.com/
I always wanted a site like this to discuss software process things without the hardcore evangelists using buzzwords. It didn't take too long to throw this up so it wasn't a massive waste but I actually thought it would start growing once I shared it with my developer/agile network. Not much interest, apparently. I'll probably have to kill it soon so it doesn't sit there mocking me.