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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#501

Post by lesterbuck »

neilsharma wrote: post #289

Problem: Completion rates for online courses are dismal and engagement with other students and faculty is low. Idea: Weekly online, live discussion sections to accompany self-paced video lectures. Discussion sections have 5-10 students and are facilitated by Teaching Assistants How it works: Students taking a MOOC course sign up each week for a discussion section. There can be multiple discussion sections to accommod…

My understanding is that the MOOC companies are barely scraping buy on their current revenue model, which is pushing a certificate for $50-$100+. If there was a way for the companies themselves to monetize discussion groups, they would be all over it.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#502

Post by lesterbuck »

kidlogic wrote: post #444

Yelp for Manufacturing - help hardware startups determine which manufacturer fits their needs and remove the question of whether or not they're working with someone qualified

This is actually a serious problem, and really solving it would be very, very profitable. For an example of the issues involved, listen to the Mixergy interview by the founders of TouchFire, and iPad keyboard. They describe the baroque method of hiring a manufacturing consultant so you don't get eaten alive by a bad Chinese manufacturer.

http://mixergy.com/steven-isaac-touchfire-interview/

Let me know if you would like to talk more about this. Contact info is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#503

Post by lesterbuck »

nashadelic wrote: post #274

A knowledge assimilator: it crawls the web and other knowledge sources and summarizes facts about any topic. The system is thus able to auto-generate a wikipedia-like page for the topic. If employed in an corporate/enterprise environment, it reads all the documentation and then someone can ask it questions like: "What does the SDP 5.1 do?", "What is the capacity of an SDP 5.1?", "Can I connect an SDP to an SCP" etc.

IBM Watson can do most of that today, in specific fields like medicine, and is growing into a general purpose learning and deep Q&A system.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#504

Post by epriest »

harryh wrote: post #177
simpleAJ wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Phabricator- http://phabricator.org/

That's part of the puzzle, but it's (AFAIK) mostly for code review and bug tracking. I'm very much interested in the build tooling & automated testing (& probably also deployment) pieces.

This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster (Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release management) in the pipeline.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#505

Post by Jonovono »

bliker wrote: post #213

I really want a nice wysiwyg markdown editor. Not the two column layout. I want syntax highlighting, but it should not only do colors but also semantics. Headings should be actually bigger and italics slanted. I tried and failed to make this idea a reality. I got to partial solution using regular expressions. But it is far from functional and reliable but it is only like 200 lines! You can check it out here: https://…

The closest:

* mangomarkdown.com

* marked2app.com

But they are not open source. I am thinking of starting to work on something. Would be very useful.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#506

Post by pjama »

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…

Take a look at a recent project of mine, which begins to implement this idea. The approach uses Wikipedia to help find 'related' and 'prerequisite' concepts for generating a curriculum.

I wrote a quick article about it, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7511837 https://medium.com/p/b45429ef49e4

...And the supporting code: https://github.com/pjama/wikigraph

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#507

Post by dmacedo »

joeclark77 wrote: post #460
dmacedo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a number of them to target, part of the business plan is to cover several (very interesting) use cases, along with creating a shared workflow for these. So while some relational databases will be covered, so will other types.

Also note I'm interested in focusing open source databases first, if not only!

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#509

Post by keehun »

refrigerator wrote: post #50
keehun wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the market size worth it? How will you reach the every-day regular-John-Smith families who aren't going to be keeping an eye out for a service like this?

I think there's definitely a market for it. Before people go out and buy fish, they usually do some research first on what it will entail, so if this site can also become a really good source of fishkeeping info and shows up on page 1 when people search for something like 'fishkeeping' or 'fish tanks' then that could be good

I guess I'm not totally aware of who the "they" are in "they usually do some research first" because I feel like a significant chunk of fish purchases come from parents of little children who are already sleep deprived and go to the nearest pet store or (God forbid,) Walmart or any other shop where they know there are fish.

If you're correct that "they usually" actually do research beforehand, there would probably be a market big enough to sustain a small online business.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#510

Post by siruva07 »

elemos wrote: post #478

A safe storage locker. I travel frequently for work between a few different cities and it's a pain to constantly have to pack and re-pack, and buy and re-buy those things which I cannot pack. I just want a locker where I can feel safe leaving my stuff in the cities that I travel to most frequently. This means I'm reasonably assured they wont get stolen as well as being afforded many of the same rights when you own or…

The physical dropbox. That's what we're building at www.makespace.com.

What cities are you in?

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