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HN: Share an unused idea

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#11
Social Babysitting.

A social network where parents fill out a profile of themselves and their child and the site tries to match up parents with children of similar ages and interests. The parents then can meet one another, check out each others homes and introduce the kids to each other to confirm compatibility. Once that is done, these mutually compatible parents can rely on each other to babysit each others kids when necessary.

The site would keep track of karma points between parents.

This would permit couples to have more alone time together without having to spend lots on babysitters.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#12
UserVoice for congressional districts as an alternative to lobbyists.

The idea is to use technology to disrupt traditional lobbying to the point that it is more difficult for the bad lobbyists to have a negative impact.

With the science of reputation and filtering systems getting better by the day, one solution might be a service that makes everyone a potential lobbyist. There are about 118,000 citizens per pair of ears in Washington according to Clay Johnson, author of the blog InfoVegan. The website I am suggesting would allow all 118,000 people an equal chance to voice their opinion. Those 118,000 opinions are then voted one by those same 118,000 people. The most upvoted items "float" to the top and get past the filter to the Congressman or Congresswoman's ears.

If you also make it so that people can't link and vote for opinions directly, you remove the one major avenue used to game the system: one person with too much time or influence spreads the link to their idea to those likely to upvote it.

Instead the system can be designed like a double-blind experiment. Ideas are stripped of names of people and organizations. The system randomly assigns ideas already submitted to be upvoted or downvoted to all participants. A participants ideas does not get submitted for voting by others until they have "bought" that right by voting on the ideas of others. Participants get a limited number of upvotes and downvotes to use, thus preventing them from giving out too many of one or the other and being forced to make a judgment call.

Those are a few ideas, but there is no reason the mechanics of voting and reputation systems can't be used for this end.

As I said above, this is a bit like UserVoice for government in that it allows users (citizens) to "lobby" the product managers (congressmen and congresswomen) for product feature requests and improvements.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#13
Learning Paths: compile a database where you specify a goal, possibly a fairly vague one, and users contribute the bits of knowledge that would be useful to accomplish it, all the way down to the very basics.

So if the goal were "Write a 3D graphics engine", users would collaboratively add items going all the way back to, say, basic geometry or trig.

I was thinking that llvm sounds pretty interesting, but I don't know anything much about compilers or interpreters, so not only do I not know how I could use llvm, but I'm not clear on what it could do. Another 'learning path' could lay out what knowledge and/or experience I'd need to build to get to the point of being able to understand and use llvm for an interesting project.

This could also be useful for teachers. A kid interested in video games could see the things they ought to learn and master, and would see how they build on each other. That would help answer the "when am I ever going to use this" question.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#14
Outsourced giveaways. Basically a blogger/podcaster/company pays me a fee to give something away for them (a book, an iPad etc) and I handle all the backend stuff like contest rules, entries, selecting a winner, contacting and shipping the prize. Eventually the site could match up companies who want to give stuff away for free with people who want to run a contest/giveaway (for a fee of course) I gave up on this idea because you'd need massive lawyer involvement as game/contest rules are different everywhere and not well understood. You would probably need a lawyer co-founder to make this work.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#15
post #7

A site for parents/grandparents who live away from their kids to read stories to their children. It should be really easy for the parent to record a story in their voice - ideally a mobile app. The kids go to a website or even just run a desktop app, say iTunes, which receives the recorded stories as a podcast.

A Story before bed (http://www.astorybeforebed.com/) already does this. It's a webapp but also has an iOS app for mobile reading and playback. They don't offer receiving the stories as a podcast, though, but you can play them back online or on your app forever.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#16

UserVoice for congressional districts as an alternative to lobbyists. The idea is to use technology to disrupt traditional lobbying to the point that it is more difficult for the bad lobbyists to have a negative impact. With the science of reputation and filtering systems getting better by the day, one solution might be a service that makes everyone a potential lobbyist. There are about 118,000 citizens per pair of e…

This would be really, really great. The biggest challenge would be to get people really using it, but if it was as widely used as UserVoice is today, it would definitely get attention. And webapps that would change society for the better would be really exciting to work on.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#17

Learning Paths: compile a database where you specify a goal, possibly a fairly vague one, and users contribute the bits of knowledge that would be useful to accomplish it, all the way down to the very basics. So if the goal were "Write a 3D graphics engine", users would collaboratively add items going all the way back to, say, basic geometry or trig. I was thinking that llvm sounds pretty interesting, but I don't kno…

I've been working on a simple graph based UI called ConceptsMap that creates a map of all the topics involved in a concept, and how they're connected. Users then submit materials that are related to each node on the graph, and vote on existing submissions. So if you want to learn about LLVM, it'll show you all the branching topics, and you can pick the 5-6 best resources for that concept.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#18

Learning Paths: compile a database where you specify a goal, possibly a fairly vague one, and users contribute the bits of knowledge that would be useful to accomplish it, all the way down to the very basics. So if the goal were "Write a 3D graphics engine", users would collaboratively add items going all the way back to, say, basic geometry or trig. I was thinking that llvm sounds pretty interesting, but I don't kno…

Funny, i've been thinking about the same idea for some months now

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#19
post #15
post #7

A site for parents/grandparents who live away from their kids to read stories to their children. It should be really easy for the parent to record a story in their voice - ideally a mobile app. The kids go to a website or even just run a desktop app, say iTunes, which receives the recorded stories as a podcast.

A Story before bed ( http://www.astorybeforebed.com/ ) already does this. It's a webapp but also has an iOS app for mobile reading and playback. They don't offer receiving the stories as a podcast, though, but you can play them back online or on your app forever.

Awesome! I'm really happy someone made it.

Re: HN: Share an unused idea

#20
groups.

create a group by setting it´s name.

join a group by knowing its name.

send messages to everybody in the group.

get contact info of everybody in the group.

create/accept/reject dates/deadlines.

share comments/links/files

this is for people who where at camps, workshops, classes, university, play in bands, work on any type of project together,...

sounds interesting?

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