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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

news.ycombinator.com

231–240 of 523 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#231

Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations. It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with one person asking a question, and another offering three funny answers, plus a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a good comeback is rehearsing a bunch of them beforehand, so you have something ready.

(For instance sometimes I like to wear little horns glued to my forehead while looking otherwise normal. People regularly ask me "are those real?" By repeatedly answering that question, I now know that some variant of "yeah, I used to file them down, but I've been letting them grow out because I've been busy" will get a laugh.)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#232
post #146

Build a company around creating a best in class development environment that they can sell to other tech companies. This would involve everything from repository management (on top of git) to build & compilation tooling to automated testing and probably more than that eventually. Once companies reach a certain scale they inevitably expend some of their resources on building internal development tools. At Foursquare w…

This is actually what I'm trying to do with my product

http://gitsense.com

GitSense is marketed as a Git solution but it's also a proof of concept for a much bigger problem that I'm trying to solve, which I believe will be critical for being able do develop tools that can work in any environment, regardless of size, process, politics, etc.

What is not obvious, which is mostly my fault due to poor marketing, is the tools in GitSense are context aware and adaptable. With GitSense, I can drop it into any enterprise environment and have it work in a way that makes the most sense to them. And what I have learned from developing GitSense, we'll be the basis for creating smarter wikis, bug trackers, continuous build systems, etc.

I'm currently working on a blog post right now that talks about my programmable metadata technology, which demonstrates the benefits of having context aware and adaptable tools.

As a side now, I'm also looking for one or more co-founder to execute this larger vision of mine. So if you are interested in tackling this problem, send me an email. You can find my email in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660089 http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png I didn't get much interest so I didn't bother building it :)

I built a prototype too: thingsy.co It finds all the pictures on Instagram with the hashtag #forsale, post them on Craigslist, and contact the seller through Instagram when a buyer emails the Craigslist contact info. Craigslist killed it.

there is a lot of activity in this sector right now, including some VC funded startups, the approach they are taking is to grab instagram #forsale pics then post it on their own storefront site

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#234
A twist on a simple timer / productivity app.

When you want to focus, instead of pressing start, you ask for time from someone else.

Once you've completed using that time, you get to pass it on to somebody else.

Completion depends on approval from the previous owner of the time.

As the time gets used, it gets passed from person to person, creating a "time chain." Participants get to see the history of the time chain. Established users can create new time chains and watch them grow.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#235

Sell anything in a snap. 1. Find something you want to sell 2. Snap a picture (or a short video) 3. Tap "list for sale" 4. Let mechanical turk + computer vision identify the object 5. Let the system pick a value (based on sales history, location, demand) 6. Contact the seller when a serious buyer made a deposit 7. Proceed to demo + sale I shouldn't have to write down any spec when selling something as ubiquitous as a…

there is a startup doing this and launching soon, can't track down the link of their site right now

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#236

This might be fairly simple, but I can't find a good solution - A replacement for Google Groups. More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client? For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough either. Goog…

try codio.io or codio.com, cant remeber url

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#238

An IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts. For those of you who develop using powerful IDEs (such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, ...), it's hard to imagine going back to a basic notepad. Most people, most of the time, don't write software. They exchange ideas, express wishes, share their feelings. And to do that, they use tools that are not more powerful than a basic notepad. This forces them to be explicit, to explain…

From my perspective (automotive product development), this is called 'system design' or even 'product development'. We start from a use case, idea, feature 'want', whatever, and we move both up and down from the idea to arrive at customer use models(up) or requirements (down).

The documents for this development start to look like hierarchies with many cross-dependencies (the solution starts to 'fall-out'). For example, if the 'want' were "I want to make routine repairs easier for customers" we'd work up to different customer use models such as "Customer is notified on head unit radio that timing belt routine maintenance is suggested" to functional objectives (or functional requirements) "Customer shall be notified of suggested maintenance 1000 miles, 500 miles, and 100 miles before timing belt suggested maintenance" to non-functional requirements "Head unit connected cell shall notify timing belt status every hour" to performance specifications "Connected cell shall meet 3G bandwidth specifications for xMbps when within xmile range of cell tower with x specification" that then get tested to our test flow requirements.

The interesting thing is this design follows a 'V' engineering model [1] and the documents and requirements do not always have the best correspondence. In fact, the user models can sometimes be captured in Microsoft Word whereas the technical specifications can be captured in DOORs. Also, the use case is not clearly delineated to a performance specification 100% of the time. In large organizations it's difficult to communicate requirements and development milestones if this correspondence isn't clearly drawn. e.g. An executive that manages user experience (UX) may not understand why technology X is in the vehicle and what it gives them. This can lead to communication issues.

So, I believe the IDE for ideas has a data structure that is hierarchical and the IDE resembles an FPGA IDE feature such as Xilinx ISE RTL schematic. In this RTL schematic, the designer can show a 'black box' such as 'My CPU Design'. The black box can be double-clicked to show black boxes that make up 'My CPU Design' such as Instruction Memory, Data Memory, a program counter, an ALU, etc... Furthermore the user can click Instruction Memory to see which FPGA elements make up Instruction Memory, etc.

In such a way, different team members in product development can see different levels of abstraction according to their own interests and responsibilities. The user model can be the top-level 'black box'. A manager can double-click the black box to see which features create the use case. The manager can further double-click the feature set to see which functional objectives create the features, etc. This would be possible all the way down to performance requirements and can even include data for 'validation' and 'verification' activities (e.g. This is the feature I wanted, are all the functional objectives that make up the feature set fully validated?).

Anyway, that would be my ideal IDE for ideas. The IDE would be cross-functional and many people could have input for multiple user models that drive the initial feature 'want'. This IDE could even help control costs of large systems "Which feature set is driving the most cost?".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#239

I've been sitting on this gem for a while. I present to you: The Bruce Wayne Gap Year. Wealthy people with desires to become Batman can more-or-less do so. First they sign a waiver and an NDA, removing any liability from the Bruce Wayne Gap Year company. Then they'll pay the company tens of thousands of dollars to pay for what is to come. They'll be put into a real criminal gang [1], and taken around the world gettin…

Wealthy people who are in a physical condition to do this, don't have time.

Wealthy people who have time, don't have health.

And those who have both, won't even talk to you.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#240
I frequently wonder if there is a place on the planet I'd be happier in. The idea is a site that allows me to select a wide variety of attributes and then search for places in the world that match those attributes. For attributes that I only care about only generally, I'd be able to select from a broad category. For those that I care a lot about, I'd be able to drill in to highly granular selections.

For example, I may only care that: : Government = Democracy

But for climate, something a little more specific: : Climate : Rainfall And then something really granular: : Sports & Leisure : Adventure Sports : Sky Diving Major categories might include: • Climate • Geography • Demographics • Government • Infrastructure • Security • Entertainment • Recreation • Culture • Education • Economy

It could be marketed as a branded plugin for company web sites in travel, real estate and jobs. They'd pay for clicks and then use the results to market their services.

I've found sites that offer this, but none have been quite what I wanted. One requires you to enter the locations you think you'd like and then helps you decide. Another was pretty close, but only covered the USA.

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