Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.
At school we often had to draw class diagrams, basically boxes containing some text, with arrows pointing to other boxes. The free tool we were using for this was made with Java, and would often be very buggy and was generally hated. I couldn't really find anything I liked and ended up making the diagrams in Gimp, not fun. I was really pining for a small perhaps Flash-based web tool that would let me make diagrams and download as PDF.
255 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadAnd, since no one has described it here yet: aside from making pretty-pictures, the really neat thing about Graphviz is that it is declarative--you describe the nodes in your graph (which can include text, shape, color, etc.), specify the connections and voila--Graphviz does the rest.
Oh, and you can use it programatically too--there are libraries for many languages, so you could, e.g., have a user submit genealogy data and then spit back a pretty family-tree diagram.
Google around and you'll find various interesting things, e.g. this recent (12/08) article on using Graphviz + PHP to generate Oracle schema diagrams: http://oracle.phpmagazine.net/2008/12/drawing_er_diagrams_fo...
or is that too eugenic?
High karma could move your mail towards top of the pile for people that don't know you (VIP).
Or posts/mails could be filtered based on karma thresholds.
[edit]: the same can be done for articles/persons etc etc. for more info http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual//html_node/gnus/Sum....
http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html
The side effect of the market would be to rank discussion systems by credibility, or signal/noise, in real time.
It's also geeky enough that I think you could keep liquidity, even though there's no dollar value to karma.
Not only is it really hard come up with a model to convert currency from many places into a "standardized" format (or even to allow for OpenID-style distribution) - it'll also not be easy to provide data to other sites that allows them to do useful things easily. Tags might be as good as it gets.
One other thing Y-people might not like: this SHOULD NOT have a revenue model, I think. Freemium completely screws you and ads on a reputation site would just feel wrong. Besides, it's a platform.
That's why I keep thinking about open-sourcing what I have, especially in order to try to solve the distribution problem before an alpha site might go online. Being a hopeless idealist I really want to see a service-decoupled reputation service that is NOT facebook/google FC.
Please let me know if any of you'd be interested to join me in playing around with this.
There's enough structure in blogs (blogrolls, tags, date, author, backlinks) --- especially if you mine comments --- to do take a stab at this.
Would there be any way to make that discussion-like structure accept input from anonymous, infrequent, or lazy users? Setting up a blog just to reply might leave out some decent responses.
The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:
http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr0401/Whyblogcommentsarebad.h...
The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.
I'd really like to eradicate blog comments.
If I get to it this weekend, I'll submit to HN when I have something ready. Thanks for mentioning uclassify -- I hadn't heard of it.
ive pared down my list of "want to dos" to a single choice, but i definitely want to use uclassify. if i hadn't buckled down, i'd have a half-working django prototype in ~/src/ right now that i'd revisit to burn some time on every 3 months.
There are lots of other reasons why a teacher might set specific rules for an exercise such as this, too. Unfortunately you chose to ignore the instructions -- and you made the mistake of second-guessing him/her -- assuming that the teacher's goal was the end result and not the process of getting there.
The Internet has provided a medium for new growth in the bartering exchange industry. This growth prompts the following reminder: Barter exchanges are required to file Form 1099-B for all transactions unless certain exceptions are met.
See: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html
But isn't that kind of like a YC startup? I forgot the name though but I remember the website being a place where you could follow people's comments on blogs. Is your idea focused on forums?
I like the idea.
It could be implemented as a flash llvm front-end with an objective C emitter. You'd also need to write a Flash VM in objective C, which I haven't looked seriously at but wouldn't be trivial.
Most importantly, a system like this would allow you write any application UI in Flash. A C developer, say, could then leverage Adobe's interface builders and the flex library without the need for disgusting hacks.
Porn games for the Wii.
It works on the Wii, btw (website in Opera).
* I hate patents.
(I've noted that the covers on the Harry Potter books in Britain seem to be drawn for intelligent people, whereas the books in the US are far more cartoony.)
Although, more seriously, I doubt it would be accepted. In order to be patented, the idea must be novel, useful, and not obvious. It meets the requirements for useful, but not-obvious and novel may be harder to establish. (Depending on any patents for single-serving condiment packaging, they may be phrased in general enough terms to be considered prior art)
Which would make it pretty tough to get into bars.
Delicious Library might do what you want?
(I hope I'm not posting too many ideas)
Right now bugmenot is pretty much useless, since all accounts are dead almost right away.
This way the passwords etc will remain private, and the accounts won't go dead right away
Honestly, I think the user side portion is a bigger problem. Its all the psychology, people change the login info so that noone else would be able to do the same thing and prevent their access.
I'll say it again: Whatever counter claim you think you have, you can not hide login info from the people you are logging into.
I still see no benefit to the users changing the account info. This is to access sites with free accounts, yes? In that case, isn't it actually just as much work to assert control over multiple bugmenot accounts as it is to sign up for the free accounts in the first place?
This wouldn't really be necessary in NYC where cabs are ubiquitous but in DC it would be useful.
EDIT: Crud, already sorta exists: http://taximagic.com/
http://fornicatur.com - a new way to meet people for well...
Though tech could be white labeled for any topic - beyond theme of domain above (GPS locate hiking buddies in central park, people who like your favorite movie, tons of stuff... interesting new way to meet people).
http://www.loopt.com/ ?
1. A screen scraping/computer vision toolkit that would supply most of the AI primitives to interpret games 2. An interpreter for each game that would provide an machine usable API to interact with the game 3. An AI program that would then play the game
Component 1 would only need to be built once, Component 2 would need to be built once per game and then Component 3 is what the kids would get to build.
I always thought this would be an excellent, gentle introduction into the world of programming.
Take Fishy (http://www.xgenstudios.com/game.php?keyword=fishy) for example. It would be really simple to build a dumb AI that could do ok but to build a really great AI would involve some really sophisticated path planning and optimization algorithms.
What better way to get kids inspired and wanting to learn about programming than have them solve the games they're already playing?
Edit: Cool name :P
Maybe the mobile could upload the photos to an online album.
:-) Just Saying.
Vicarious parenthood is cheaper, cleaner, and you can take a break from it whenever you want.
But nieces and nephews have a higher payoff than Facebook.
It just seems to me that music is the perfect social product...
To make time flow slower, make a watch where hours last more than 60 minutes. That way you will accomplish more in each hour.
I prefer the second solution. Productivity is more important than hours worked.