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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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71–80 of 182 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#71

Post by bennyhirsch »

syerram2 wrote: post #61

An insurance plan for APIs - in today's world companies are extremely reliant on 3rd party APIs for a variety of applications (FB Ads API, Twitter's API, etc.), however, in my experience, these APIs are not a 100% reliable & can sometimes go down which impacts the end customer/user. Similar to travel insurance, if you can provide the option as an add-on to buy insurance against this downtime - there are several busin…

Interesting thought. How would this insurance plan work? monthly payment to Twitter for API insurance, and if their API goes down just a financial payout? This doesn't really make me whole again as my business is still impacted.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#72

Post by [deleted] »

olalonde wrote: post #59

A tool/system to manage dot files. Some ideas: - easily install dot files on a new system - keep track of files in git - possible to specify different configurations (OS X, Linux, etc.) - possible to exclude sensible dot files (i.e. .ssh/id_rsa) - easy to update files and keep them in sync - the tool should not be mixed with individual dot files repositories so that it's easy to upgrade to a newer version - eventuall…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#73

Post by keithwarren »

stoev wrote: post #23

How about a search engine that bases its results on how unique the information is on every one of them. Every time I try to do an in-depth research on Google about some topic I open up 10 or 20 of the most relevant results, only to discover that at least 80% of the information is repeating itself in at least 50-60% of the pages. One could write a search engine that compares the contents, groups the articles that have…

At some level, DDG does this already.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#74

Post by blakesterz »

An open source proxy server used for libraries to use so they can give access to the paid restricted-access databases and other websites available only to certain patrons. Most types of libraries (especially college and public) have resources they pay for and require users to authenticate in order to access. There's currently not a nice easy to use FOSS solution for this.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#75

Post by aclissold »

olalonde wrote: post #59

A tool/system to manage dot files. Some ideas: - easily install dot files on a new system - keep track of files in git - possible to specify different configurations (OS X, Linux, etc.) - possible to exclude sensible dot files (i.e. .ssh/id_rsa) - easy to update files and keep them in sync - the tool should not be mixed with individual dot files repositories so that it's easy to upgrade to a newer version - eventuall…

A simple Bash script with Git submodules satisfies all those criteria, other than the fact that it should be a separate tool! Feel free to steal ideas from my script if you want to build your own tool: https://github.com/aclissold/dotfiles

I thought about how it should look when I do a fresh install:

sudo apt-get install vim zsh git git clone my repo into .dotfiles cd .dotfiles ./update.sh

and I'm right back to where I was. :). The script differentiates between Mac OS X and Linux, and running git pull followed by update.sh also syncs any changes I may have made on another machine to the current one.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#76

Post by olalonde »

gbrits wrote: post #60

Included this last week, but a bit late so less eyeballs. Hope it's ok to repost... 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 t…

Really cool idea. I wonder how hard it would be to initially populate the database using existing sources (Wikipedia/http://www.freebase.com/) and some AI.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#77

Post by VLM »

flashmob wrote: post #22

Programmer's laptop: A good quality, high performing, non-widescreen laptop with a 4:3 aspect rato. Why? With a taller screen, there's less scrolling and your eyes don't have to jump as much when reading from line to line. I would like to know if there would be a market for this and why manufacturers phased out 4:3 displays?

"I would like to know ... why manufacturers phased out 4:3 displays?"

There are no "monitors" made anymore just HDTVs. Sometimes real small ones in laptops.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#78

Post by atto »

charismaticfoo wrote: post #27

A bookmarking service, that not only saves any "interesting" links that you visit but also saves the data in that link for future search. The service should let you specify topics that you are interested in and will analyze every page you visit (with the exception of blacklisted pages) and put it into the appropriate bucket (topic), for future reference. It should also index the PDFs and word documents that are read…

Check out https://www.kifi.com. Nearly everything you mention is out there or is on the near-term roadmap. We'd love feedback, I help build it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#79

Post by olalonde »

dmd wrote: post #53
olalonde wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not easier. You have to wait for the OS to load, login, find the app you want in your menu bar, etc. I think Wine just opens the app in you current desktop environment and it's presumably faster since it doesn't need to emulate the CPU.

VMs don't "emulate the CPU".

Ah, I thought they did (at least the CPU architecture, not down to the actual transistors/atoms). Wouldn't a full blown VM which also needs to run the OS have more over head than Wine though?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#80

Post by s3cur3 »

olalonde wrote: post #41
sdrinf wrote: post #39

A media browser for leveraging (browsing, and surfing) multi-terrabyte home media servers: Problem: I've got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I've found my available tools to be too low-leverage on managing this anymore. Context: about 2 years ago, I've stopped the directory structure madness, and embraced search as first-order link for media files. As a byproduct of this, I notice I don't have…

Have you tried http://www.plex.tv ?

+1 for Plex. I almost gave up on the idea of a HTPC after the headache of correcting hundreds of mislabeled files in XBMC. Since I switched to Plex, the problem has all but disappeared (I can think of 3 or 4 things I've had to manually correct).
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