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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 209 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#141

I bought "thecoffeeprophecy.com" On a whim a while ago... Suggestions so far have included a straight to kindle thriller, tripadvisor for coffee shops, and a service where I cover myself in coffee grounds on webcam and predict things for people. Suggestions welcome...

Predict, based on the spread rate of Starbucks franchises, how long it will take for a new Starbucks, closer to your home than the current nearest, will be built.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#142
"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie:

  $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo
  $ please archive this directory into foo.zip
  $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github
  $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar'
Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly switches and just did what we said?

It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and vocabulary.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#143

Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I can look for new ideas posted.

I created a bookmarklet many years ago that does this and a little bit more: https://github.com/cosmok/HackerNews_Sorter

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#144
post #102

What's stopping us from making something like http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/ ? Samsung came out with a phone in 2010 with an e-ink keyboard (Samsung Zeal). Are there any unsolved obstacles preventing this kind of keyboard from becoming a reality? I would imagine such a keyboard, even at a $300 price point, would be massively more successful than the Optimus Maximus ever was. To entice users…

One problem. People what spend $300 on a keyboard are quite familiar with computers. This is the same group of people that types and uses shortcuts without ever looking at their keyboard, so the benefit is highly reduced.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#145

If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can be played while viewing the movie. Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary.…

not that interesting. It distracts the focus from the content. plus there are tons of such stuff people do on youtube.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#146
post #130

Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows a normal home to monitor: 1)What food has been bought? 2)What the expiration date is? Warnings when food is going out of date. 3)What meals can be made based on the food “in stock”? I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at hom…

I've thought about something similar but get hung up on data entry. How do you make it not miserable to get food purchase data into the app, given that food doesn't have an RFID tag in it, and not everything (produce) has a barcode? I like the receipt idea - partner with grocery stores to print a qr-code with a machine readable list of items and (maybe) expiration dates. Having to do any kind of manual scan on each item I bring home from the store feels like too much behavior change to become part of my everyday routine. Maybe there's an opportunity to do it for institutional kitchens where inventory is required by default?

It would be fun to build the fitbit and basis integrations. Also, Randall Munroe offered a different approach: http://xkcd.com/1109/ :)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#147
Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them.

Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answer is no.

Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular.

I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#148

Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I can look for new ideas posted.

This was discussed a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606310

Long story short, there's browser extensions for this.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#149
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>within seconds This is the part I don't understand. You would need to have a whole lot of scale and incentive for people to give their feedback this fast and often. Jelly can take a while to get a response, for instance.

Every time you upload your own photos, you are forced to rate other people's photos before you get your own response. This is the incentive. Rating photos is very fast -- just look at two photos and tap one. All network lag can be eliminated by pre-caching the images. I'd bet the average rating speed is one per second (it's all snap judgements). As long as the app has 30+ people using it at every moment of the day, y…

You don't want to force people to do anything, otherwise it skews the results. Force someone to vote for 30 seconds, or to vote 10 times, and they'll just sit there tapping the first picture until they reach their target. You'll get lots of votes, they'll just be useless.

I think you'd get enough votes if the app was in the right format. It would have to be like hot or not, where you have 2 photos, pick one, and instantly get another 2 photos along with the results from the first set. This gets people trapped in the just one more click mindset.

Focus it on fashion and clothing, people will vote to see more photos, to judge the outfits of others (a lot of people enjoy doing this for fun), and to get inspiration for themselves.

Also, allow users to select what gender and age groups can vote on their photo.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#150
post #27

A/B testing for the masses. Here's an example: Say a someone is deciding which shirt to wear. They whip out their smartphone, launch the A/B app, takes a picture of themselves wearing each of two shirts. Within 30 seconds, they have an answer of which shirt hundreds of people liked better. While they're waiting for the reply, they're prompted to rate other people's pictures. This is as simple as seeing two pictures a…

It's limited to pictures of people, but MyBestFace sounds like what you're describing. https://www.okcupid.com/mybestface
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