Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#111
post #106

Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals. From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identific…

Interesting idea, but I wonder how many copies of my data would need to be stored across the system to guarantee that at least one copy is available when I want it? Many people don't leave their personal computers switched on all the time, especially if they go away for a few days, then there are network outages, people deciding to leave the network, ...

Yeah. I think some of that would resolve itself as the network grew. Otherwise, whenever I've spent much time thinking about it, I've figured that it should be possible to have a nearest-neighbor node notification protocol.

Node A declares that it's quitting to Nodes B and C (or Nodes B and C are suddenly no longer able to poll Node A); Nodes B and C both check the chunks that they know Node A had, and see if there are enough redundant copies of those chunks in the network.

There's a lot of "and then magic happens!" in this idea, but I'm pretty sure it's do-able. The worst part of it by far is doing node searches on a completely decentralized structure.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#112
post #90

Make an app-store, but for web applications. You can fill it to begin with using affiliate links to existing web apps. Once you get a decent number of people using it, you can allow people with new web apps to advertise there, or charge for subscriptions to be listed there, or take a cut out of every sale/signup. Many ways to skin this cat.

to certain extend, jolicloud provides this.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#113
I also think that you have put the horse in front of the cart.

Start an idea pad- this can be a note on your phone or whatever, and whenever you have a problem with something or think "I with I could...." then write it down

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#114
post #3

Why don't you ask the people in your team? They're more likely to give more to the project if the idea comes out of a discussion of theirs, rather than something you just present to them.

Although you also face the possibility of disenfranchising someone who thinks their idea was way better and should have been picked.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#115
post #36

Here'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…

>Underserved search terms: find some way to figure out what terms have a lot of search traffic but very few good results

Industrial espionage at Google/Bing/Yahoo .. ?

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#116
post #55

I don't make music but I love music. This is a way to potentially help every indie artist/label in the world. I have an entire database of music industry listings. These types of databases usually cost lots of money and therefore independent artists have been excluded from using them. We're talking 50,000 listings spanning across the united states and canada. Lots of independent labels and artists I've spoken to are…

Why free? The value seems to be all in the database. You'd better have some brilliant FE on that if you don't want people to simply rip your db and compete with you.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#117

"trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware" Having ventured into this realm, Just Say No. Or, at least don't think about the problem like, "Restaurants pay much too much for POS systems...I could build something cheaper and better." Contact me if you want to know more or would like an intro to some people in that space. Having said this, here's what I want..... I just bought what is, at le…

Gosh, when using Skype with a decent headset with a good mike (e.g., a higher-end Shure), the audio is crystal clear--just like being in the same room.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#118
This is something I've been wanting to see:

Virtual animals/monsters roam the earth (probably relegated to streets/parks for property issues), and with your phone app, you hunt them, collecting trophies/treasure.

You could join safari parties with friends to hunt the scariest of monsters, or to share resources.

Fun fun fun.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#119
post #22

I like the comedy website idea. If tracks or "bits" were tagged it would be even better. "clean", "family", "kids" (for example) And then I could hear Bill Cosby's cookie jar bit, or Bill Engvall's I.G.Joe bootcamp bit, I'd be in listening heaven. HOWEVER, I know for a fact there used to be something out there similar to this. I think it was called "haha" or something like that. I don't know if it exists or went away…

StackExchange is working on that last part already. http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/

I just got goosebumps. This is what I've been hoping/waiting for.

Re: Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

#120

Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals. From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identific…

Sounds like Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNet
Post reply on HN