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Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#81

Post by gscott »

h34t wrote: post #69
ivankirigin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural American Spirit helps native americans, right? "[they] purportedly donate a portion of their revenues to Native American charities." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_American_Spirit That isn't too far off. Either way, with taxes, lots of money goes to government mandated campaigns against smoking, tort damages, and miscellaneous government pork. You can't really control that.

Certainly taxes help, but this would target the money that isn't going into taxes -- I think there's still enough profit in the tobacco industry for a project like this to have a shot at working. Thanks for the interesting link. I like their idea a little, but I see donating some portion of revenues to Native American charities as a far cry from hitting the nail directly on the head with a "real" mission-driven non-p…

The tobacco taxes have been misspent. In San Diego none of the tobacco tax money went to health care. Zero, not one percent of it.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#82

Post by brianmckenzie »

h34t wrote: post #63

Non-Profit Tobacco. Find a way to give that majority of smokers, those who don't like what they do (but do it anyway), the ability to purchase high-quality cigarettes whose 'profits' go to cancer research and as-effective-as-possible anti-smoking campaigns.

Best idea I've heard in a long time. Better hope the smokers don't sue you, though.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#83

Post by brianmckenzie »

staunch wrote: post #57

Socratic Blogging. Two or more (real or fake) people have a conversation about a topic and it's posted as a blog entry. I think it'd make for a really interesting new genre of blogs very different from the traditional essay style. A web-based Ajax chat style writing system and an IM client plugin as well, would make it super convenient and painless to create new posts. Traditional bloggers might occasionally do these…

I tried to implement this into a blog engine I wrote at my last job, but management didn't get it and directed me to stop working on it. I quit to work on my startup a month later.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#84

Post by yters »

BrandonM wrote: post #64
yters wrote: post #41

Combine email, chat, blogging, etc. into one real time system on facebook. Everyone's going to want to start communicating there anyways, since the trust network keeps out spamminess. (I think someone said something similar last time)

Isn't that just a description of Facebook itself? The message system is the e-mail, the Notes is the blogging, and the Wall is the chat...

my point is that they should be one system. Similar to how email and chat are the same in gmail.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#86

Post by sebg »

ericb wrote: post #17

Here's one, but if no one does it and it's feasable, some day I might. I'd like to implement a large continual self-report study via email for the public good. Via an email every day or so, data is slowly gathered from participants--all anonymized in a number of ways. The emails would be questions proposed by researchers or lifestyle data to look for correlations with product use, habits, physical traits and disease…

An interesting way to get around the problem of people lying would be to aggregate all the search words a single person searchs and see if there are interesting correlations to other singular points. You could write a plug in that feeds all your searches annonymously to a central database where you could run a gamut of tests.

To your example, when I get a new drug I look up all the side effects (so I would look up thalidomide). Then I have a child and it turns out that my child has birth defects. I would look that up to see who else has that out there has experienced having a child with the same birth defects. As search continues, it would eventually pop up that people who look up side effects of thalidomide also look up birth defects. Then someone could do a serious study on it sooner than later.

As in all cases using data, the major impediment is anonimity and scale of data collection.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#87

Post by c4rider »

tristian wrote: post #21

I've always wanted to be able to write notes on top of emails I receive. So say I receive an email about a new bug, I could just jot down more details into another layer on top that email in transparent font/colour. I've noticed other people often print out emails and do something like this with a red marker. I use Thunderbird and I've thought about digging around in the source to see if this is possible. It's not so…

If you use thunderbird there is an add-on called Xnote that does just that.

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#89

Post by myoung8 »

yubrew wrote: post #61
myoung8 wrote: post #3

We were going to build a web service to make the college application process easier for students, but don't really have the time right now. If you like the idea, check out sites like prstats.com or mychances.net (very poorly implemented, but good ideas IMO). Also, let me know and I'd be happy to share our early research with you.

One of my friends working on this, http://www.peerdecision.com/

This isn't quite what we had envisioned. This doesn't really do anything new...

Re: Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

#90

Post by ivankirigin »

I realize some misdirection on my part. I should post my ideas in this context too. This thread will be gone by Friday, so I'll continue to submit ideas as separate posts like these: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65320 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65083 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.tipjoy.com/our2cents/2007/10/real_liveblogging_li... "Real live-blogging, live comments, and a comment API"

Live blogging is an interesting aspect of the blogosphere. Bloggers post in real-time, often while attending an event, chiming in live with their thoughts and views. This is a great way for bloggers to communicate with their readers, but it's currently not well supported in blogging tools.

Live bloggers should be able to update their posts in some manner similar to a chat client, or collaborative editing software. The system would take the blogger's new content and appended to the post on the readers screen without a page refresh. It would be entertaining to watch something so live, along with a different take on the process of posting to a blog. Readers could see sentences edited and thoughts refined.

Ideas come from writing them down, and this would be a live crystallization of thought.

The stream could be synchronized to an event, and then later could be played back to get the same experience.

Similarly, comment sections could be live. This is nothing new, with group chat rooms updating messages to the whole group. But it would improve the user experience of a comment thread, with new comments appearing on the site live. For sites with comment modding, the votes could also be live -- watch trolling comments nose dive and disappear.

Regarding comments - comment systems should have open APIs. For example, if a blog post makes it to the front page of reddit, digg, and Hacker News, there will be 4 disparate comment threads, one at each of the news sites, and one at the original blog. Rather than forking the conversation, recommendation sites augment it: grab from and push to a comment feed. Comments on Hacker News should be visible on the original blog, and comments there should appear on Hacker News. (Except YouTube comments; no one needs to see those.)

I already mentioned a few of these points to the Disqus folks. They certainly have a good system on their hands, and any real competitor would have to do everything they do, and maybe add a few of the ideas here.

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