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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#311

Post by MarkTee »

mden wrote: post #133

Idea: Tree of knowledge Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a…

This (Metacademy) was just posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617683

Excited to see where it goes!

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#312

Post by krapp »

mden wrote: post #133

Idea: Tree of knowledge Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a…

I experimented with something along these lines by attempting to build a threaded layout between sites based on outbound links, hoping that (for blog posts and articles) this would tend to generate a nice set of references back to original sources, etc.

The result (http://precis.gopagoda.com/url/https://news.ycombinator.com/...) still doesn't entirely work right, partly because my implementation is still pretty poor and because I could see how flawed the premise was after I actually tried it - if you try it you'll find a lot of 'threads' wind up at spam links or twitter and facebook inside of a couple of levels.

Still, I think this is a problem worth solving. Good luck with it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#313

Post by ryandrake »

avalaunch wrote: post #174

A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home. There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your…

It's neat, but I'd be worried about market size. This is a problem that not a lot of people have. Sorry, but for most people, it's not a big deal to call a plumber, and the vast, vast majority of people (at least in the US) clean their own homes.

EDITing my comment to be more constructive:

There could be money in a cloud- or app-based Personal Assistant, but you would really have to focus razor sharp on your target market. Rich people already have PAs and middle class people's time is not scarce enough to justify paying to get chores scheduled. You'd have to zero in on upper-middle folks like doctors and lawyers who aren't particularly rich, but tend to not have time to manage their lives. I still say it's a small market, but if you hit them and your price is right, it might work.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#314

Post by danneu »

conroy wrote: post #143
mudil wrote: post #138

WP plugin to charge for guest posts. As a blogger for last 10 years, I think someone should consider providing WP blogs with ability to charge for guest posts. That can be done either as a single time purchase (for a single guest post) or as a recurring payment (i.e. monthly charge for unlimited or predetermined number of guest posts per month). The purchaser makes a payment and opens an account, and then is redirect…

Matt Cutts has said recently[0] that guest blogging should be avoided. [0]: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/

He's condemning "low-quality spammy for-SEO" guest blogging.

Googlebot doesn't magically know when you're guest blogging or gaming it. All it can do is pattern-match against heuristics that you can avoid.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#315

Post by lightcatcher »

mden wrote: post #133

Idea: Tree of knowledge Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a…

Metacademy ( http://www.metacademy.org/ ) is exactly what you described. The website gives a concept map and each concept has links to free educational resources. Here's the concept map for SVD: http://www.metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/singular_value_dec...

You can read a bit about the ideas behind Metacademy here: http://hunch.net/?p=2714

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#316

Post by gbrits »

Related to @mden's Idea: Tree of knowledge.

Chrono: chronological inventions and academic breakthroughs of mankind as a dependency graph. This is a lingering idea that has been coming back to me a couple times a year over the last decade or so.

What if there's a kind of semantic wikipedia that is built upon a dependency graph of inventions and academic breakthroughs. What led to the invention of the internet, to nano-tubes, etc? How cool would it be from an education standpoint to be able to jump back in time and see invention upon invention replayed (with backgrounds on how these breakthroughs came to be) up to today.

Check out what led to invention X (the galaxy S you're reading this on), played back . Or reversely, lookup which inventions were build (transitively) upon the discovery of Y. You'd also finally be able to answer definitively who was more important: Tesla or Edison ;)

Socio-economic backgrounds, anecdotes, etc. what led to invention X, and how X was important for Y, etc. An interactive "Short history of nearly everything"

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#317

Post by qw »

manish_gill wrote: post #140

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…

In my opinion, discussions were handled better in the old Usenet days. How about running a private NNTP server and use one of the programs that forwards the mailing list to the NNTP server? There are still lots of good NNTP clients out there like XNews

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#318

Post by hopefulwebdev »

pnathan wrote: post #216

Chores service. For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore. Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the apartment building is poorly laid out. I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want someone for random h…

Similar? https://www.taskrabbit.com/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#319

Post by sahil_videology »

Dwolb wrote: post #238
miguelrochefort wrote: post #85

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 exampl…

I second the need for something like this. This kind of tool can be used for clearly communicating scope and even aid estimation of timelines because it shows all the complexity.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#320

Post by binarymax »

Food Golf.

(Code golf - for recipes). A community where members submit recipes. Score is a function of ingredient count and cooking time. The lower the better. Recipes are also rated for taste/quality by the community.

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