Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Idea Sunday

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#521

Post by eli »

liyanchang wrote: post #399
eli wrote: post #389

An automated "backup" service for your website that crawls around and builds a static copy of all the pages it can see. If the site goes does (or if you push a maintenance mode button) it switches to the static site, maybe with a small warning message. You'd probably need to run the DNS or integrate with DNS services to make that easy to implement. The key is it needs to be stupidly easy to set up. (ping me if you ac…

Very similar, but not exactly: Cloudflare. Takes over your dns routes and will detect when you are down and tries to continue serving.

Yeah, they offer something similar (and in some ways better since it proxies all the requests, it knows what files to save). But it's not quite what I want.

Also there's a lot more you could do. For example, versioning: show me what the site looked like last thursday. For people using crappy or nonexistent CMSes this could be huge.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#522

Post by danohuiginn »

adam419 wrote: post #73

A way to submit any legal document, and for a fee have it returned but explained in plain english. What do you guys think about this? And what do you think are the most common use cases/legal documents?

I'd get lawyers to write up explanations of common blocks of legal text. Then you just find them in the contract, and provide an interface to view the explanations alongside the text.

For extra money, you can highlight a section of text, and a laywer will tell you what it means. Once a few people have asked about some phrase, you can include it in the general data bank.

Make it easy for users to hire a lawyer through you for more extensive work -- that gives you a massive revenue stream, even if only a few people take you up on it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#524

Post by luch »

asnyder wrote: post #445
hooande wrote: 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.

I'm disheartened by their conversion to Webkit. Tab grouping + session save is one hell of a killer feature : I used to archive websessions in order to track my references when writing a academic paper.

I've switched to Firefox from then, but it's not as convenient as Opera12.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#525

Post by ozgung »

marmano wrote: post #97

A voting system based on the Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System behind Bitcoin. The major reasons votes couldn't be conducted electronically is because of trust issues and today we have a technology that solves that. I think this could potentially disrupt voting if properly executed.

I see this idea very promising. This problem is a very good research topic for academics. I'm sure the current shortcomings can be fixed.

The main problem is that all the transactions should be public, but the individual votes should be kept as private. We may overcome this problem by a 2 level system, just like in the traditional offline elections.

1. Ballot box level. Each 'digital ballot box' has a certain amount of voting coins. Voters go to a voting site, prove their identities and are given a key for a single transaction. This transaction transfers one voting coin from the ballot box to one of the recipient wallets (each wallet representing a candidate or a decision).

2. Network level. All transactions from ballot boxes to candidate accounts are public and verifiable using bitcoin protocol.

At the end of the voting period all the remaining unused coins must be transferred to a common wallet representing empty votes. So these numbers must mach: Number of coins = number of voters = sum of coins in all wallets

Candidate with the most coins wins.

The main benefit of bitcoin voting is that it's not a centralized system. It's open, online and verifiable.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#526

Post by yread »

paulkaplan wrote: post #523
mavdi wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Citation needed?

I think mavdi really meant "diagnosed sooner". Or perhaps cancer deaths could be prevented? Either way, just google "cancer blood in urine" or stool and you get the idea.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#527

Post by luch »

Spittie wrote: post #158

I've been having this in my mind for a while: A nice way to organize & share my knowledge. I know that lots of people have a self-hosted wiki or similar where they write nice tricks, something that they learned about and might be useful in the future, nice ideas... Well, I'd like something like this, but more "social". Pages could be shared (or public), anyone could write a comments on something (I'd love to see comm…

some influencial tech blogs (in order less famous) in France use a lot this delicious-clone : https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli.

It's a one-click bookmarlet with public/private separations, RSS built-in for syndication, and there are implementations of dashboard multiplexing sources : http://shaarli.fr/.

No comments though (the author seems against it).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#528

Post by larrydag »

A peer-to-peer broadband solution to replace ISP dependence. Perhaps this could be used on a small scale at first for hacker communities and then grow from there. Challenges would be on interconnecting between p2p community centers without relying on major ISPs. A hyrid approach might be needed at first to establish connectivity.

Previous efforts:

Netsukuku - http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-i...

P2P Foundation Blog - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#529

Post by mrfusion »

jarofgreen wrote: post #317
marmano wrote: post #97

A voting system based on the Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System behind Bitcoin. The major reasons votes couldn't be conducted electronically is because of trust issues and today we have a technology that solves that. I think this could potentially disrupt voting if properly executed.

Can't really see a way of doing this without all votes being public, which is sometimes wanted but often not?

Well you'd register to vote just like you do now, by mail or online, and get returned a wallet instead of a little certificate.

You'd just need a law that the voting center can't track the wallets I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#530

Post by charlieok »

hooande wrote: 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…

I've started using Pocket for this.

They need a better browser UI, since they seem to have been focusing much more on their mobile apps, but their recently-added "highlights" features accomplish the "bring them back to the front occasionally" part of your description.

Post reply on HN