The graveyard of good ideas
Solutions that were tried, and what stopped them.
Patents that were rejected or abandoned, products that shut down, projects that went quiet. Borrow the idea, avoid the dead end.
1,095 solutions
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: I'm disabled and out of money. Now what?
TL;DR: I'm a founder who had some success, but now I'm disabled, can't seem to hold down a job. I'm close to defaulting on my car. I am (unsurprisingly) depressed. I need help but don't know where to go. I spent the 2010s as a founder. My company was funded by YC and several others. We were moderately successful but didn't see a meaningful exit. After my startup failed, I started consulting to pay the bills. In 2018 I started having problems with chronic pain and gradually became less and less capable on the job. Consulting gigs were letting me go because I couldn't keep up. The last time I worked was over a year ago, and I finally exhausted my savings in early June 2022. I live as cheaply as I possibly can at this point. I live with family and only pay for absolute necessities. It comes out between $1200 and $1500 per month. I'm in the US and I ha
Why it failed: TL;DR: I'm a founder who had some success, but now I'm disabled, can't seem to hold down a job. I'm close to defaulting on my car. I am (unsurprisingly) depressed. I need help but don't know where to go. I spent the 2010s as a founder. My company was fund
thrwtllwy
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
Today I'm launching Postcard! I started Postcard when I deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network. When I worked at Webflow, it became clear to me that most website builders are way too complex for individual users. So, I drew inspiration from social media - where all you need is a couple photos and text fields to get a great site online. So, I think I’ve about achieved a site builder that even my Mom could use. The product seems simple, but there are many under-the-hood optimizations. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, TLS certificate issuance + management, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, full-text RSS feed, email reputations, and more. It also uses a couple new products to make the domain connection process easy. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions! PS -
Why it failed: Today I'm launching Postcard! I started Postcard when I deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network. When I worked at Webflow, it became clear to me that most website builders are way too complex for individual users. So, I
philip1209
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: How do you handle being assigned Ops tasks knowing you joined to do Dev?
Title is pretty much it. I joined Oracle a few months ago after applying to a dev position. As soon I joined, I was assigned Operations work which to be honest is not what I was hoping for. I was wondering if anyone else in the HN community experienced something like this before? Is this common in bigger companies where it's more "Closing Jira Tickets" than actual coding work? Is this gonna paint me as an Ops person from now on? I started seriously thinking about quitting and looking elsewhere. Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Why it failed: Title is pretty much it. I joined Oracle a few months ago after applying to a dev position. As soon I joined, I was assigned Operations work which to be honest is not what I was hoping for. I was wondering if anyone else in the HN community experienced something like this before?
ahil95
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Favorite product that got shut down?
Trying to launch a search fund to acquire VC backed businesses that couldn't scale. Would love your recommendations and get on a mission to revive a favorite product of this community.
Why it failed: Trying to launch a search fund to acquire VC backed businesses that couldn't scale. Would love your recommendations and get on a mission to revive a favorite product of this community.
rajarshc
- startupShut down2022
Just witnessed a missile strike on Kyiv city
There’s just been two more explosions. The first was unheralded, but for the second, first there was gunfire - I grabbed the camera and went to the window, opened it, and I could hear a loud droning noise, an engine - and then I saw a bright white missile in the sky, completely uncamouflaged, flying at a moderate altitude, perhaps 500m? it flew slowly, right-to-left in my field of view, and then began to dive towards its target, the sound of the engine becoming increasingly louder and stronger, and then it plunged below the line of buildings (I’m on the 15th floor) and I could see it no more, then the inevitable crack-bang - different to the explosions from a few days, not so large, but where I had the window open I felt the blast wave come to my face and body, and then of course with sick certainty the unfurling column of dark grey smoke shooting up from the impact site. I’m hoping not
Why it failed: There’s just been two more explosions. The first was unheralded, but for the second, first there was gunfire - I grabbed the camera and went to the window, opened it, and I could hear a loud droning noise, an engine - and then I saw a bright white missile in the sky, completely u
Max-Ganz-II
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
There was a long discussion on HN the other day regarding why companies are having trouble hiring engineers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437 One of the recurring themes is the "leet code" interviews. I will go further and say that any interview that doesn't mimic the job is a guaranteed way for me to turn the company down. Stop accepting shitty interviews When I was talking to trading firms about coming back to the finance industry, about half of them admitted they already use my open-source software. And yet, only one firm bothered to ask me about how some of my stuff was implemented. That's the firm I'm working at now. Instead, I got plenty of firms that still insisted on asking me questions that are not remotely related to the job. Tons of Hacker Rank and Codility, even though I've never had a time limit when building somethin
Why it failed: There was a long discussion on HN the other day regarding why companies are having trouble hiring engineers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29892437 One of the recurring themes is the "leet code" interviews. I will go further and say that any interv
chrisaycock
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: I shut down my company, now I need a job
Two weeks ago, I announced ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598978 ) that I was shutting down my companies, 70 Million Jobs and Commissary Club (companies that helped the formerly incarcerated get on with their lives). The overwhelming volume of support I received just through Bookface and Hacker News stunned me; my heart overflowed with pride and gratitude. Now I am facing another challenge: I need a job. I’ve spoken with many recruiters and HR professionals, along with people who are interested in either acquiring my company(s), funding them or just want to make themselves available for a chat. I’ve received offers for leadership positions at nonprofits, but I haven’t yet discovered the right fit. Maybe I love the startup life too much. Maybe my criminal record hurts my chances. (Maybe!?!) Maybe my age is a deterrent. Before I accept a position that doesn’t thril
Why it failed: Two weeks ago, I announced ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598978 ) that I was shutting down my companies, 70 Million Jobs and Commissary Club (companies that helped the formerly incarcerated get on with their lives). The overwhelming volume of support I r
RBBronson123
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Project maintainers in Ukraine – which projects are in danger?
Ukraine has (had) a vibrant developer community. The war has made many folks switch from the IT side to the military. Do you know of any Open Source projects that are at risk of being abandoned because their lead dev / maintainer has left to fight (with a risk of never returning)?
Why it failed: Ukraine has (had) a vibrant developer community. The war has made many folks switch from the IT side to the military. Do you know of any Open Source projects that are at risk of being abandoned because their lead dev / maintainer has left to fight (with a risk of never retur
oger
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Does anyone actually Use GCP?
We are building a product to improve the DevEx of GCP and IaaS cloud. We are evening building and running this app on GCP! Gasps (we're not sure GCP even runs on GCP). For context, the search bar in the GCP web console can't even do proper substring searching on assets such as App Engine. In less than a month/16+ hour days, our two person team has already built superior search capabilities. My co-founder has been sold on the pain-points on GCP, but the question becomes: why does anyone even bother? We believe there is some scale and inflection point at which GCP makes sense, but GCP products are disconnected from hobbyists. This month, we've received 10k visits and paid $120 on CloudRun (app server) and CloudSQL (Postgres). We used the lowest cost configuration including 1 CPU each. Yes, $120 for 2 x 1 CPU, 10GB SSD, 5GB ram total. It's not even been a month, act
Why it failed: We are building a product to improve the DevEx of GCP and IaaS cloud. We are evening building and running this app on GCP! Gasps (we're not sure GCP even runs on GCP). For context, the search bar in the GCP web console can't even do proper substring searching on assets
diceduckmonk
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Circumflex, browse HN in your terminal
Some two years ago, I found myself spending a lot of time in the terminal between learning vim and discovering new command line tools. I was surprised to see that the niche of HN clis was (relatively) small, and so I decided to write my own command line tool for browsing HN called `circumflex`(`clx`). `clx` is written in Go using Bubble Tea[1]. You can read the comment section or the linked article in reader mode in the pager `less`. Using `lesskey` to add custom keybindings, the replies can be collapsed and expanded in real-time (but not individual replies, only all replies at once). Behind the scenes I am appending invisible unicode characters to each line so that I can use the custom keybindings to filter them out. The same technique is used to allow for jumping between top-level comments. I spent a lot of time thinking about syntax highlighting and finding relevant bits to highlight
Why it failed: Some two years ago, I found myself spending a lot of time in the terminal between learning vim and discovering new command line tools. I was surprised to see that the niche of HN clis was (relatively) small, and so I decided to write my own command line tool for browsing HN calle
bensadeh
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: Living without electricity in Kyiv
So, rolling power cuts probably begin today, power company says four hours or less. The attacks on power generation are awkward. To my eye, if Putin can keep up the attacks and inflict damage more quickly than it can be repaired, Ukraine ends up with increasingly long blackouts each day, and then maybe days of blackouts. Cities do not work without power, in ways we can hardly imagine - for example, you can’t buy anything, because the tills no longer work. You could in theory use cash, with the shops keeping a pile of ready cash at each till for this, but how do you as a customer get cash when the ATMs are not working because the power is out? The metro shuts down, of course. So do the traffic lights. How do you get into the city, or from A to B? you can walk, but only so far, and when you get to your destination, if it’s an office block, or condo, the elevators are not working. I live on
Why it failed: So, rolling power cuts probably begin today, power company says four hours or less. The attacks on power generation are awkward. To my eye, if Putin can keep up the attacks and inflict damage more quickly than it can be repaired, Ukraine ends up with increasingly long blackouts e
Max-Ganz-II
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: How common is a 4-day work week in our industry?
So, for the last 8 or 9 years, I've offered prospective employers a 20% discount on salary if I can work 4 days a week instead of 5. I usually go with start-ups because they're under pressure to hire top-talent but skimp on costs (i.e. they want to offer below-market costs but have trouble justifying why), and they're usually flexible enough to not have a HR policy etched in stone against this kind of flexibility. It also usually takes some sort of warming-up to the idea and a whole pitching and easing process to get it (so I'll work 5 days for the first few months), but it usually works out in the end. I make everything sound like it's economics while discussing it, but I actually get 1000x more enjoyment out of my work and non-work lives under this time-split. There's some stigma around 'lazy' and 'work ethic' that I usually have to get
Why it failed: So, for the last 8 or 9 years, I've offered prospective employers a 20% discount on salary if I can work 4 days a week instead of 5. I usually go with start-ups because they're under pressure to hire top-talent but skimp on costs (i.e. they want to offer below-market co
i_dont_know_
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down
So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population). When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture. This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginning
Why it failed: So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobi
RBBronson123
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: SigNoz – open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic
We just released a major upgrade to SigNoz with support for Logs management based on ClickHouse. Would love to get any feedback from the community here on what you think and any questions you may have for us Many big companies like Uber and Cloudflare have been shifting to ClickHouse as their main workhorse for Logs management seeing much better performance. for e.g Cloudflare recently shifted from Elastic to ClickHouse and are seeing 8x improvement in memory/cpu resource requirement in ingestion. This is our first release with Logs support and we have added support for: - Filtering logs based on fields - Full text search in logs - Live mode to see logs coming in realtime - Detailed view of logs in table and json format with ability to add filters quickly - Ability to specify interesting fields which will be indexed by default
Why it failed: We just released a major upgrade to SigNoz with support for Logs management based on ClickHouse. Would love to get any feedback from the community here on what you think and any questions you may have for us Many big companies like Uber and Cloudflare have been shifting to ClickH
pranay01
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Why doesn't archive.today get shut down?
So far as I can tell you can use archive.ph to bypass paywalls on most news sites. Scientific journal publishers have gotten crackdowns on sites like sci-hub, music companies got Napster shut down, there has been a continuous game of whac-a-mole against torrent sites like the Pirate Bay. archive.ph never seems to be the focus of a controversy, I never hear about anytbody trying to shut them down, they don't even seem to be struggling with technical countermeasures against their paywall bypass. Once in a while you see a crazy rant like https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5mj/dear-gamergate-please-stop-stealing-our-shit but there is no real movement against this site. How do they get away with it?
Why it failed: So far as I can tell you can use archive.ph to bypass paywalls on most news sites. Scientific journal publishers have gotten crackdowns on sites like sci-hub, music companies got Napster shut down, there has been a continuous game of whac-a-mole against torrent sites like the Pir
PaulHoule
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: iOS Signal eats your disk space
Signal on iOS will not free up any disk space when you delete chats or media. You cannot see or clear usage in the app or in iOS settings. There’s a potential security problem where your data is not actually being deleted when you delete chats. We are having no luck getting the Signal team to acknowledge the issue. The ticket was automatically closed despite activity. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4916 1. Be aware that a large portion of your storage space might be stolen by Signal. 2. Be aware that this might be a significant security flaw. 3. If anyone can get Signal to pay attention rather than closing repeated tickets as stale, that would be great.
Why it failed: Signal on iOS will not free up any disk space when you delete chats or media. You cannot see or clear usage in the app or in iOS settings. There’s a potential security problem where your data is not actually being deleted when you delete chats. We are having no luck getting the S
Waterluvian
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: Salesforce has globally revoked Slack's holiday shutdown benefit
The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer Experience (their support team) ran skeleton shifts). Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit).
Why it failed: The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer
SadSlackbot
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
Saying the following feels like heresy and whenever I say it, fellow software engineers look at me as if I just asked them if there are GOTOs in Javascript. I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly. Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language. Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, aside from all the differences we might have about static typing in programming languages, we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands. Many of these things that made my job much more than slaving at a digital conveyor belt seem to be gone these days. And the worst thing for me is that I feel few people rela
Why it failed: Saying the following feels like heresy and whenever I say it, fellow software engineers look at me as if I just asked them if there are GOTOs in Javascript. I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their
samuel_backend
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Is anyone else genuinely scared that this is the start of WW3?
Russia has invaded Ukraine, and four days on I feel powerless to both do anything (in a country that is neither of those two!) and to look away from the news and social media coverage of it. It's an abhorrent waste of human life. News and reports today of Russian ICBMs and other nuclear forces being placed on high alert (and moved further towards the west of the country) [1] frankly scares me. While some observers think that this is "overplaying" his hand [2] I know that all of this is deeply concerning. The world does _not_ need another cuban missile crisis; it also does _not_ need to vanish in a pile of radioactive smoke. I live in Europe. My father sent me a message to essentially ask if I'd had a thought about where my nearest "shelter" would be -- and I had. My partner's family have too. It feels awful, but I can't concentrate effectively -- I
Why it failed: Russia has invaded Ukraine, and four days on I feel powerless to both do anything (in a country that is neither of those two!) and to look away from the news and social media coverage of it. It's an abhorrent waste of human life. News and reports today of Russian ICBMs and o
azalemeth
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?
What's you life work? What is it that you're working on, be it an area, company, game, language, subject, cause etc. That you expect to work until the end of your life? Starting with me it's a little bit hard. I have so many interests that picking a single one out of all of them is hard. But I plan on working on companies, causes, philosophies, books, areas etc. Some of the areas I'm interested in are: Intelligence, IQ, Collective Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Writing, Sleep, Comics, AI, Game Design, Meta Cognition, Zettelkasten, Linguistics, Design, Coordination etc. My current project is: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook. It's a mixture of Roam Research, Obsidian, Emacs, VSCode(in the future), Figma etc. I plan on making an online mode for people to share and collaborate with other people being as easy as sharing a link. I don&
Why it failed: What's you life work? What is it that you're working on, be it an area, company, game, language, subject, cause etc. That you expect to work until the end of your life? Starting with me it's a little bit hard. I have so many interests that picking a single one out
examplary_cable
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Generate never-before-seen storyboards for Rick and Morty episodes
Rick and Mortify is a system we built for creating never-before-seen episodes of Rick and Morty by leveraging the state-of-the-art in generative AI. These days generative AI is so hot right now. It promises to revolutionize all aspects of creative work from copywriting and image creation, to video and audio synthesis. Given the rapid progress of AI, when will we see an AI system listed in the closing credits of your favorite feature-length film? Rick and Mortify is a tool we built to demonstrate that future is closer than you might think. Our tool uses the state-of-the-art in large vision and language models to create never-before-seen episodes of Rick and Morty with minimal human intervention. All the plot points, dialogue, and accompanying visuals are generated with machine learning. Why use Rick and Morty as a case-study? Because 1) given the show's complex narrative structure an
Why it failed: Rick and Mortify is a system we built for creating never-before-seen episodes of Rick and Morty by leveraging the state-of-the-art in generative AI. These days generative AI is so hot right now. It promises to revolutionize all aspects of creative work from copywriting and image
nutellalover
- startupShut down2022
Clara.io Shutting Down
Received this email today: Hi Clara User, This is a notice that we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31, 2022. If you have files that you would like to continue using, please download that content before December 31, 2022 because it will not be available after. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for using Clara. Sincerely, Clara Admin Team
Why it failed: Received this email today: Hi Clara User, This is a notice that we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31, 2022. If you have files that you would like to continue using, please download that content before December 31, 2022 because it will not be available aft
tarr11
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: A Demo Day without the investors
When Harry (my co-founder) and I started Trevor.io we obviously needed customers. We'd often bonded over Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale", so it was a no-brainer that every month, like clockwork, we'd get on that €50 Ryanair flight to London, to spend a week pitching potential customers / partners / anyone who would listen. We tried as best we could to rotate which lucky friend or family members' sofa we would be sleeping on each time, so as not to out-stay our welcome. One event that we ended up doing again and again was called TechHub Tuesday Demo Night. It was an epic monthly event (first Tuesday of every month) hosted by the most sought after startup co-working space on London's famous "Silicon Roundabout" (yes, us English can't quite fill a valley yet with our startup scene, but we sure can fill a roundabout!
Why it failed: When Harry (my co-founder) and I started Trevor.io we obviously needed customers. We'd often bonded over Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale", so it was a no-brainer that every month, like clockwork, we'd get on that €50 Ryanair flight to Londo
tagspace
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Shut down a startup despite strong traction?
We are showing strong traction (100k monthly users) but we're struggling to find investors for our pre-seed round. We're first time founders without a big network and the current market downturn makes it even harder for B2C startups to raise money. Did you ever have to shut down your early-stage startup despite strong traction?
Why it failed: We are showing strong traction (100k monthly users) but we're struggling to find investors for our pre-seed round. We're first time founders without a big network and the current market downturn makes it even harder for B2C startups to raise money. Did you ever have to
Freddie111