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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#451

Post by vishaldpatel »

radikalus wrote: post #135
vishaldpatel wrote: post #16

Here's one I've had for a little while: Say you're playing a sport with your friends. You're yelling at each other.. commands likes, "pass the ball here". Or if you're out playing paintball and trying to coordinate an attack - your sound, and your opponent's sound are both pretty important. As far as I know, such use of voice does not exist in any game. Player's voice does not really interact with the environment. So…

Dolby Axon had something similar-ish: You and others on voice chat were in a 'virtual' room and the sound was stereo/volume adjusted accordingly. I remember that when people misbehaved on group voice chat we used to "put them in the corner" It didn't map to the game environment but the execution was pretty nice; I fear that, if you use the game's physics, you'll quickly realize why radio-comm became such a thing

Yes for sure.. but one would have to be close to the enemy player and then he'd be dead. And ally players.. well.. maybe there can be a way to mute allies ;).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#452

Post by avalaunch »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #401
loomio wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who often appreciates the comments as much or more than the content - yes! I often come across articles in places other than Reddit or HN and wish I could do a "reverse lookup" to see where it might have been submitted just so I can read the comments.

There's a Chrome add-on which uses the Algolia API to do this. It adds a pop-out side bar showing the HN comments for the page/article you're currently reading. You must be on the page submitted, rather than on a comments page, though.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sideba...

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#453

Post by sarthakk »

krishna2 wrote: post #405
yzhou wrote: post #176

Here's what I want: A cheap text ssh terminal with wifi,or cellular, nice keyboard hardware, with extremely long battery life (or solar powered), which i can just throw it in my car and forget it. Whenever I am away of my computer I can always log in to my cloud server and write codes or do some quick fixes.

This should be possible with a Kindle. The basic Kindle costs $50 or so. And it is a fork of Android. And has a month of battery life. There are some Kindle-roots [Search "root a kindle"]. Would something like this work for you? The keyboard will still be the kindle-keyboard. The other option is a cheap ipad with a bluetooth keyboard. If you turn off all the unnecessary apps and notifications and put it on airplane m…

The basic Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite don't use Android. It's only the higher end models like Kindle Fire that use the Android fork.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#454

Post by nbardy »

personlurking wrote: post #19

Just going to throw this one out there. I live in Lisbon, it's tourist-central (I'm from SF and I've never seen so many tourists). Since I see a ton of lost people every single day there should be a way to digitally leave comments on things and places and a free one-stop shop to find such info (like Wikitravel). This info, although having a central repository, should be pushed out to an app that connects to one's pho…

I was thinking this exact same thing while traveling. Location based wikitravel essentially.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#455

Post by avalaunch »

chrisduesing wrote: post #242
miguelrochefort wrote: post #90

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…

I like the idea, but would love to see it taken a couple steps further. To me, the biggest issue with selling things online is dealing with the people who are interested in purchasing them. I have had less than stellar experiences with both eBay and Craigslist. I would love something like an expanded Gazelle that was not just electronics. Perhaps even with physical locations for things like furniture, exercise equipm…

I too have had less than stellar experiences on both eBay and Craigslist. The last time I tried selling on Craigslist I listed a brand new lamp, unopened in box. I included all the manufacturer's pictures and details (dimensions, weight, ect...). I received an email the next day from a lady interesting in purchasing it. She asked if we could make the exchange in a Walmart parking lot (in retrospect, that should have a warning sign). 5 minutes after the agreed upon meeting time I received a text that she was running late but would be there any minute. 15 minutes later she arrived and instead of apologizing for wasting my time by running late she insisted on opening the box before purchasing it. I refused since I was worried this would lower the value if she chose not to purchase it. She was being stubborn though so I eventually acquiesced. At this point I really just wanted to offload the lamp and go home. Upon inspection she said that she was sorry but wouldn't be buying it because it was smaller than she thought it would be, never mind the fact that I included the dimensions in the listing. As I was about to drive away, she offered me half of the agreed upon price. Why she suddenly wanted it again despite it being too small I'll never know as I immediately sped away.

Like you, I have a lot of stuff I'd like to sell. What I want: a company to send me pre-labeled and pre-paid shipping containers that I then fill with my stuff and leave on my front porch (safe, rural neighborhood) to be picked up. Every week or so they pay me until everything is sold - minus a commission so that our interests are aligned to get as much as possible for each item. I can't seem to find a service that makes it that easy though.

Oh, and that lamp? Amusingly, I took the lamp back to Home Depot where I had bought it new 3 years earlier. I had no receipt and I told them honestly how long ago it was originally purchased. None the less they offered me a full store credit. The catch was that they no longer carried that brand of lamp and hadn't for over 2 years. In fact, it had been so long since they last sold the lamp that they didn't have pricing information on it in their database. Since they couldn't determine how much I paid, they instead gave me store credit equal to that of a lamp they currently had in stock that we agreed was comparable. I was so impressed by their generous return policy that I promised to one day spread the word of how awesome they are.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#456

Post by xerophtye »

mikeblum wrote: post #275
miguelrochefort wrote: post #130

Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor sticked with us for that long. I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is with a diagram. http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak... You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to blanch vegetables. Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need b…

I'm on a side project right now that involves indexing recipes by ingredients and the like, making an api could make the jump to substitutions and other meta-like mods.

Have you tried http://foodpair.com/ ?? it scrapes recipes from different sites and indexes them ingredient and lets you search recipes by just telling it what ingredients you have. You can also click each ingredient in a recipe to find out general substitutions for it (not recipe-specific).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#457

Post by xerophtye »

personlurking wrote: post #19

Just going to throw this one out there. I live in Lisbon, it's tourist-central (I'm from SF and I've never seen so many tourists). Since I see a ton of lost people every single day there should be a way to digitally leave comments on things and places and a free one-stop shop to find such info (like Wikitravel). This info, although having a central repository, should be pushed out to an app that connects to one's pho…

I think someone made this with augmented reality. Don't remember name of app though, it was a few years ago. It let contributors have their own "streams" so at any given location you can focus on content by a certain user. Like following a tourist trail, or a scavenger hunt. That kinda solves the cluttered comments problem

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#458

Post by s369610 »

Idea: ShowMeThere (needs better name, camanywhere?)

An phone/web app that allows you to click on a place in google maps and request a "cammer" for x minutes, you pay $x and anyone running the software on their phone that is near that location can accept the offer and start streaming video from their phone to you, allowing you to have a kind of "live" street view.

There is UI for the payer to click on arrows to inform the cammer to move here or there, and to zoom or focus on certain things, also a pre translated set of things to help communicate with cammer. Cammer gets paid after the x minutes is up.

Cammer gets cheap money for being a personal camera man for someone somewhere else in the world.

Client saves a trip out there to see something for himself.

Use cases: Want to see if an antique you are looking for is at the markets but cant get away from work?. Want to check out markets in turkey but live in australia? Want to see what the surf is "really" like right now and whether you should bother heading out? Police work/chases! heaps of uses.

For popular events and markets, a cammer could setup shop and offer high quality streams etc.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#459

Post by xerophtye »

harryh wrote: 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…

I hear microsoft's suite integrates well with each other to achieve that. But alas, that's just for .NET

But what's wrong with IntelliJ?? We use it for Java EE and it works pretty darn well. Repository Management, Local server management, Compilation/deployment, it has everything and its executed pretty well. Although i suppose it's restricted to java...

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#460

Post by joeclark77 »

dmacedo wrote: post #384
joeclark77 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Database version-control is IMHO going to be very important in the near future. I'd encourage you to go ahead with it!

Definitely! So far gathered thoughts on this, documented some business and sustainability plans (some awesome ideas here), and planning a medium-term timeline to actually work on. But this is very complex to handle on my own, and only in my spare time!

Have you thought about a database to target? I know there are 3rd party tools for SQL Server version control, but haven't been exposed to any for PostgreSQL, which is becoming my database of choice.
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