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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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491–500 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#491
post #44

A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message: +------------------------------------+ | 4,376 people received this message | | | | [Cool, it was ] [It was a waste] | | [important and] [of my time to ] | | [worthy of our] [ read this ] | | [ time ] [ message ] | | | +-------…

If the voting doesn't work it should be possible to gather other metrics such as how long the message was visible on the screen - in other words did the recipient actually read the email. Over time it would learn the users typical reading speed. Another would be how long was it sitting in the inbox before it was read. A smart email client can detect when the recipient actually notices that the email is there.

With these metrics it could then work out which members of the company send out the least well received emails. There are certainly some people where I work who have a very low interesting email ratio. These people would be prompted to sort this out.

One risk would be the employee that just sends out jokes would of course appear to be highly effective. Some algorithms would be needed to filter out work vs play emails.

To creep employees out, these metrics could be readily available to management and used in their performance reviews as part of all the other data obtained about them!

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#492
post #40

An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially, being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you "own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself. Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off. (tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)

PrivateCore has a product to do this for OpenStack:

http://privatecore.com/vcage/

Not sure if any IaaS providers are offering services based on it yet, though.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#493
I use Spotify for listening to music, it pushes data through to Last.fm, but I suck at actually checking Last.fm for its (very good) new music recommendations.

So take one of those recommendations from the Last.fm API and email it to me each week. Add affiliate links (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) and take a little cut each time I buy something I discover through this.

Better yet, if Last.fm just implemented this themselves I'd be so happy.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#494
Do this for me and I will subscribe.

I will send a box full of my letters in month to you, you scan them and make them searchable online for me and send the box back with a label.

Later when I need something, I can search online and know which box it is in.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#495
post #481

A device that sits in your toilet (under the water level) and detects trace amounts of blood or other stuff that shouldn't be in urine or stool

This is an excellent idea. Lot's of cancers can be prevented this way.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#496
post #444

Manual route planning for walkers/runners/cyclers. My idea was that there are lots of fitness style apps that track where you've gone, how fast and so on, but I haven't seen anything that lets you plan your route out beforehand, see how long it'll be and then estimate how long it will take. I was thinking drawing a simple overlay on a map interface. I recently got back into walking/running and wanted to slowly ramp u…

have you tried something like www.gmap-pedometer.com? that's how i plan my routes and I've been pretty happy with it.

I hadn't, that actually looks pretty good. Thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#497
post #72

A solution for the "too many tabs open" problem. Need a way to save my history in an organized and interactive manner, with a nice looking UI. Sort of like the old WebMynd ( http://webmynd.com ). I find that most of my tabs are open as a form of reminder. If I close it, I'll forget it and might as well not have seen it. Same if I hide it away in some kind of bookmarking app. I think it would be best to apply a UI lay…

Opera, up to 12 has the best tab management, groupings, etc that I've ever seen. It's a real shame the new webkit based Opera still isn't up to par. As such I'm in the same place as you hoping for Opera's tab management but left with hundreds of unidentified tabs in Chrome. Plugins help a little bit but nowhere close to Opera's innovative management. Hopefully they'll restore parity soon.

The Windows feature (in the sidebar) is especially helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called Github

As I said at the end of the first paragraph: >So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in.

So Facebook. :) How about limiting the audience of your Facebook posts to a list of developer friends?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#499

This is less an idea, more something for someone to think about. We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect. Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting extreme rhetoric? Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitab…

I'm part of a community that limits how much you can post and (up)vote in a day. The points for these actions are shared. There is no down-vote.

There are two kinds of users, regular ones and "elders" of sorts. First few were established years ago and they can vote on others to become "higher tier" users as well. How much votes you need depends of how many people can vote.

The registration is not automatic, but you fill out a form with an open-ended question and selected users (mentioned above) can vote to approve the registration.

The system has threaded discussions where every post is equal. So you create a post and it can become a new "topic" (or forum, or however you want to call it). These can be nested of course. Whether something is a comment, topic, list of topics, blog, ... depends entirely on the template used to view that entry. You can manage privileges (rwx) to these subtrees (or any single node in the tree).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#500

Keep Writing. I, sometimes, would like to write on a subject but I fear no one will read the material. If I had X people simply suggest to "keep writing" I would be more willing. Keep writing is something like Medium but it allows someone to post text (news, fiction, stories, anything) that is not complete. Writers set a (hidden) number of votes they should reach before they keep going then they publish what they cur…

Check out http://helpmewrite.co/ - submit the title, lets people vote.
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