7 ms·

this might be a joke, but this is a serious problem i have as well. i want to create something, but i don't know what to do.. there is nothing i need that is n

by cosmez 11y ago

this might be a joke, but this is a serious problem i have as well. i want to create something, but i don't know what to do.. there is nothing i need that is not already done, or at least thats why i think.

joshu 11y ago
You get ideas from building things. Go help someone else's project or build something that already exists for practice. Ideas will come to you when you are in the throes of something else.
joshmarlow 11y ago
I feel like there should be a general dumping ground for cool-but-as-yet-unimplemented-ideas. It could be for people who have an idea, but don't know how to build it, or just don't have the time, but really want it to exist. You'd probably have to immediate make the idea is Creative Commons or some other license when you posted it though.
- chockablock 11y ago
  Check out halfbakery.com , a not-totally-serious compendium of near-inventions, which is at least useful for getting some mental sparks going.
vertis 11y ago
Here are some of my super secret ideas that will help you take over the world. If you use any of these ideas you agree to remember me when you get rich (you don't actually have to give me any money, just drink champagne and think happy thoughts about me) - Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved. - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday) - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing. edit: formatting
- wipash 11y ago
  > Group purchasing for work I use https://www.splitwise.com/ https://www.splitwise.com/ for this. Works well for everything from big expenses to burgers. Use it in my flat too.
- cosmez 11y ago
  The finding app sounds like something i could use!
- Swizec 11y ago
  > - Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved. It's called an office manager. Combined with an expense account for the company. > - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday) It's called Foursquare. Bonus, it does this for a radius around your current location and when it doesn't have official data, it makes a guess based on check-in data. > - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are It's [probably] called the Uber/Lyft interface from the drivers' side. > - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing. Haven't reached the Omg Everyone Is Getting Married age, but I'm sure this also exists already.
  - eitally 11y ago
    On the last one, I've never seen a formal registry (managed through a retail store) that didn't denote whether someone had already purchased an item.
    - vertis 11y ago
      Main part of the idea was not creating a huge wish list, but rather just the de-duplicating part of the wedding registry.
      - cowpewter 11y ago
Iv 11y ago
I have like 20 drafts of things I'll never work on because of lack of time but that I think are pretty good ideas. Fraom games to programming tools including network tools, educational applications, etc... What are your areas of expertise and interest?
- cosmez 11y ago
  Web Programmer using Microsoft Stack. i do my hobby projects using Racket (mostly PLT stuff)
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Publish your ideas in a repo? That way people can help refine them.
matt_morgan 11y ago
Do you know what I found out over the last few days? There's no simple tool that you can use to download the actual content of your website, you know, for migrating it to a new CMS or whatever. Unbelievable. Something that will just run a text extraction through `wget -r` and save it all. Boilerpipe does the extraction nicely, but nobody has turned it into a simple tool. You just have to have a job and try to get stuff done for a while and this kind of thing comes up. Just wait and watch.
- Borealid 11y ago
  Do you mean like httrack ( http://httrack.com http://httrack.com )? If you're talking about the source for dynamic pages, you can use any file copier like rsync. But httrack is your go-to if you're just talking about downloading a web site mirror image.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    I think he means smarter: given a bunch of CMS pages which are text content (different per page) surrounded by (semi-fixed) boilerplate, extract all the content nicely for re-importation. It's a bit of a one-off, though.
    - Immortalin 11y ago
      Try a combination of Curl/wget/httrack with Pup (https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/ https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/)
      - matt_morgan 11y ago
        Thanks everyone. Httrack is awesome, but yes, I mean smarter. Pup looks cool. I want the result to be something that turns 200 pages of staff bios into something I can pay someone $15/hr to copy-paste quickly into the new CMS. Boilerpipe does it nicely, but doesn't do the whole job without wget and some scripting, plus it costs money or is complicated (it's in Apache Tika, I guess). But back on-topic, all I really mean to say is that something like this happens to me like every other week. Productize your scripts.
DenisM 11y ago
I have a bit of the opposite problem - I have too many things I could be doing, and not nearly enough energy to do anything beyond the one project I'm working on. I'll tell you how I got there: every time I'd get annoyed, or see someone else get annoyed, I made an effort to imagine what would it take to make the problem go away. Once I achieve a decisive imaginary victory by any means, I start walking back from there to the realm of possibilities - can I make it cheaper or quicker? Without Superman's help? Without magic non-existing material? It becomes a habit after a while, and you start seeing opportunities everywhere. I'm not talking about necessarily software, any case when a person is annoyed will do as a training exercise; you'll be surprised. I imagine it can also make a fun game, if you have friends who are up for it.
- rayalez 11y ago
  Thank you for the awesome advice!! I will definitely start doing that. Recently I have been thinking a lot along these lines, and I came up with somewhat similar approach. When I stuck at coming up with ideas, I make a list of what I would do if I would have time/power/resources of: - God - literally ability to fix any problem, do anything imaginable. - Google - billions of dollars and smartest people in the world - Elon Musk or Richard Branson - millions of dollars, decades of time to plan for - 10 years and 10 million dollars - 5 years and 200k I've recognized that my lack of ideas comes from me "filtering out" everything too expensive or too hard or too uncertain, and making such list helps me to get rid of that. Think of a project ideas from the opposite direction, not "what can I do now", but "what needs to be done", and then solve it from there.
  - Nutomic 11y ago
    I don't think that will get you anywhere, because you can't realistically solve any of these problems. What helped me was to use open source software a lot, by switching to Linux and using FOSS Android apps (have a look at f-droid.org). Another cool option (like another comment said) would be decentralied versions of existing services, eg Youtube, Facebook, Github etc. Some projects like that already exist.
    - 11y ago
brownbat 11y ago
> i don't know what to do.. there is nothing i need There's a contradiction buried in there somewhere. You're really just in the market for inspiration. Maybe build a program that randomly generates project ideas you can thumbs up or thumbs down. Maybe just mash together subjects and predicates from other github project descriptions into some kind of project madlibs. It could at least be entertaining.
ryandrake 11y ago
How about a service that matches up people with ideas but no implementation ability with implementors with no great ideas? Give it a tinder interface so both parties can swipe through until there's a match.
bbcbasic 11y ago
Solve your own minor problem. For me it would be be searching in source for anything that is built in release not debug mode. Or more generally a better local search solution for source code. Powerful enough to find what I need without resorting to regex.
derekp7 11y ago
Here's something I need -- a `tar` command for Windows that stores Windows-specific acl entries (dacl I think they call them?). As for the tar format that would hold this -- take a look at PAX format tar files, and how the Red Hat patches to GNU tar store Linux acl and selinux entries. If you need a jumpstart on how the various tar file formats work, let me know and I'll do a good write up on it (I had to learn all this when I created my backup system).
coldtea 11y ago
>there is nothing i need that is not already done So, you don't have anything to do. Relax and enjoy a coctail.
4lejandrito 11y ago
Have you considered making something for the sake of it? I am starting to see apps/services as pieces of furniture. Many people enjoy making them by themselves rather than going to Ikea. Why couldn't you do the same with an app/service? Build your own thing even if it is already built by someone else. You will have a lot of fun and who knows what the outcome might end up being...
pjc50 11y ago
There are plenty of things which are done, but done badly. "X, but decentralised" is popular at the moment. Or think of things that people would like to do but don't because it's too much hassle: backup. Encrypt. Ask people what the hassles are in their life and interactions with technology. Or alternately, do a cool but purposeless tech demo. I've always wanted time to play with procedural generation.

by cosmez 11y ago

joshu 11y ago

You get ideas from building things. Go help someone else's project or build something that already exists for practice. Ideas will come to you when you are in the throes of something else.

joshmarlow 11y ago

I feel like there should be a general dumping ground for cool-but-as-yet-unimplemented-ideas. It could be for people who have an idea, but don't know how to build it, or just don't have the time, but really want it to exist. You'd probably have to immediate make the idea is Creative Commons or some other license when you posted it though.

chockablock 11y ago
Check out halfbakery.com , a not-totally-serious compendium of near-inventions, which is at least useful for getting some mental sparks going.

vertis 11y ago

Here are some of my super secret ideas that will help you take over the world. If you use any of these ideas you agree to remember me when you get rich (you don't actually have to give me any money, just drink champagne and think happy thoughts about me) - Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved. - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday) - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing. edit: formatting

wipash 11y ago
> Group purchasing for work I use https://www.splitwise.com/ https://www.splitwise.com/ for this. Works well for everything from big expenses to burgers. Use it in my flat too.
cosmez 11y ago
The finding app sounds like something i could use!
Swizec 11y ago
> - Group purchasing for work - what if you wanted to break the cost of a Foosball table up over a group of people. It's cheap if you have enough people involved. It's called an office manager. Combined with an expense account for the company. > - App for finding which stores are open at 11pm (or on Sunday in places where most things are closed on Sunday) It's called Foursquare. Bonus, it does this for a radius around your current location and when it doesn't have official data, it makes a guess based on check-in data. > - Swarm - Reverse how people get taxis, register that you're looking for a taxi and expose to taxi drivers where all the people are It's [probably] called the Uber/Lyft interface from the drivers' side. > - Reverse registry - wedding registries are obnoxious...register your gift so that people don't buy the same thing. Haven't reached the Omg Everyone Is Getting Married age, but I'm sure this also exists already.
- eitally 11y ago
  On the last one, I've never seen a formal registry (managed through a retail store) that didn't denote whether someone had already purchased an item.
  - vertis 11y ago
    Main part of the idea was not creating a huge wish list, but rather just the de-duplicating part of the wedding registry.
    - cowpewter 11y ago

Iv 11y ago

I have like 20 drafts of things I'll never work on because of lack of time but that I think are pretty good ideas. Fraom games to programming tools including network tools, educational applications, etc... What are your areas of expertise and interest?

cosmez 11y ago
Web Programmer using Microsoft Stack. i do my hobby projects using Racket (mostly PLT stuff)
voltagex_ 11y ago
Publish your ideas in a repo? That way people can help refine them.

matt_morgan 11y ago

Do you know what I found out over the last few days? There's no simple tool that you can use to download the actual content of your website, you know, for migrating it to a new CMS or whatever. Unbelievable. Something that will just run a text extraction through `wget -r` and save it all. Boilerpipe does the extraction nicely, but nobody has turned it into a simple tool. You just have to have a job and try to get stuff done for a while and this kind of thing comes up. Just wait and watch.

Borealid 11y ago
Do you mean like httrack ( http://httrack.com http://httrack.com )? If you're talking about the source for dynamic pages, you can use any file copier like rsync. But httrack is your go-to if you're just talking about downloading a web site mirror image.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I think he means smarter: given a bunch of CMS pages which are text content (different per page) surrounded by (semi-fixed) boilerplate, extract all the content nicely for re-importation. It's a bit of a one-off, though.
  - Immortalin 11y ago
    Try a combination of Curl/wget/httrack with Pup (https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/ https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/)
    - matt_morgan 11y ago
      Thanks everyone. Httrack is awesome, but yes, I mean smarter. Pup looks cool. I want the result to be something that turns 200 pages of staff bios into something I can pay someone $15/hr to copy-paste quickly into the new CMS. Boilerpipe does it nicely, but doesn't do the whole job without wget and some scripting, plus it costs money or is complicated (it's in Apache Tika, I guess). But back on-topic, all I really mean to say is that something like this happens to me like every other week. Productize your scripts.

DenisM 11y ago

I have a bit of the opposite problem - I have too many things I could be doing, and not nearly enough energy to do anything beyond the one project I'm working on. I'll tell you how I got there: every time I'd get annoyed, or see someone else get annoyed, I made an effort to imagine what would it take to make the problem go away. Once I achieve a decisive imaginary victory by any means, I start walking back from there to the realm of possibilities - can I make it cheaper or quicker? Without Superman's help? Without magic non-existing material? It becomes a habit after a while, and you start seeing opportunities everywhere. I'm not talking about necessarily software, any case when a person is annoyed will do as a training exercise; you'll be surprised. I imagine it can also make a fun game, if you have friends who are up for it.

rayalez 11y ago
Thank you for the awesome advice!! I will definitely start doing that. Recently I have been thinking a lot along these lines, and I came up with somewhat similar approach. When I stuck at coming up with ideas, I make a list of what I would do if I would have time/power/resources of: - God - literally ability to fix any problem, do anything imaginable. - Google - billions of dollars and smartest people in the world - Elon Musk or Richard Branson - millions of dollars, decades of time to plan for - 10 years and 10 million dollars - 5 years and 200k I've recognized that my lack of ideas comes from me "filtering out" everything too expensive or too hard or too uncertain, and making such list helps me to get rid of that. Think of a project ideas from the opposite direction, not "what can I do now", but "what needs to be done", and then solve it from there.
- Nutomic 11y ago
  I don't think that will get you anywhere, because you can't realistically solve any of these problems. What helped me was to use open source software a lot, by switching to Linux and using FOSS Android apps (have a look at f-droid.org). Another cool option (like another comment said) would be decentralied versions of existing services, eg Youtube, Facebook, Github etc. Some projects like that already exist.
  - 11y ago

brownbat 11y ago

> i don't know what to do.. there is nothing i need There's a contradiction buried in there somewhere. You're really just in the market for inspiration. Maybe build a program that randomly generates project ideas you can thumbs up or thumbs down. Maybe just mash together subjects and predicates from other github project descriptions into some kind of project madlibs. It could at least be entertaining.

ryandrake 11y ago

How about a service that matches up people with ideas but no implementation ability with implementors with no great ideas? Give it a tinder interface so both parties can swipe through until there's a match.

bbcbasic 11y ago

Solve your own minor problem. For me it would be be searching in source for anything that is built in release not debug mode. Or more generally a better local search solution for source code. Powerful enough to find what I need without resorting to regex.

derekp7 11y ago

Here's something I need -- a `tar` command for Windows that stores Windows-specific acl entries (dacl I think they call them?). As for the tar format that would hold this -- take a look at PAX format tar files, and how the Red Hat patches to GNU tar store Linux acl and selinux entries. If you need a jumpstart on how the various tar file formats work, let me know and I'll do a good write up on it (I had to learn all this when I created my backup system).

coldtea 11y ago

>there is nothing i need that is not already done So, you don't have anything to do. Relax and enjoy a coctail.

4lejandrito 11y ago

Have you considered making something for the sake of it? I am starting to see apps/services as pieces of furniture. Many people enjoy making them by themselves rather than going to Ikea. Why couldn't you do the same with an app/service? Build your own thing even if it is already built by someone else. You will have a lot of fun and who knows what the outcome might end up being...

pjc50 11y ago

There are plenty of things which are done, but done badly. "X, but decentralised" is popular at the moment. Or think of things that people would like to do but don't because it's too much hassle: backup. Encrypt. Ask people what the hassles are in their life and interactions with technology. Or alternately, do a cool but purposeless tech demo. I've always wanted time to play with procedural generation.