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.
796 solutions
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes) going through the rounded point - I had to draw semi accurate maps of actual places (UK, South America, US west coast) in the HTML canvas using just line segments. I tried a few different solutions, including using SVG data. I ended up using the topojson library to give nice line approximations to Ge
Why it failed: This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to
MCSP
- startupShut down2024
High-resolution postmortem human brain MRI at 7 tesla
This tool provides performs segmentation, parcellation and registration of ultra high-resolution (< 300 microns) postmortem human brain hemisphere at 7 tesla t2w MRI. This pipeline leverages advances in both deep learning and classical surface-based modeling techniques. The developed method allows us to perform vertex-wise analysis in the template space and thereby link morphometry measures with pathology measurements derived from histology.
Why it failed: This tool provides performs segmentation, parcellation and registration of ultra high-resolution (< 300 microns) postmortem human brain hemisphere at 7 tesla t2w MRI. This pipeline leverages advances in both deep learning and classical surface-based modeling techniques. The de
pulks
- startupShut down2024
Tell HN: Google OAuth consent screen issue could be costing you signups
TL;DR: The "Sign in with Google" form doesn't debounce clicks on the "Continue" button, so it can trigger multiple redirect callbacks, in our case causing 15% of signups to fail. We've since reproduced the issue with several other companies' signup flows. What's the issue? A few months ago we (Flat.app) noticed that a meaningful fraction of signups-via-Google to our SaaS product were failing. I recently found out why, so I'm sharing this PSA for anyone facing a similar problem. If your app supports "Sign in with Google", it's likely that new signups will fail if, on Google's OAuth consent screen, a user clicks "Continue" more than once. The error will probably be inscrutable to the user, depending on your setup, so they may just give up instead of trying again. In our case, we were losing around 15% of signups! I
Why it failed: TL;DR: The "Sign in with Google" form doesn't debounce clicks on the "Continue" button, so it can trigger multiple redirect callbacks, in our case causing 15% of signups to fail. We've since reproduced the issue with several other companies' sig
Aalk4308
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: I made TV Sort, a web-based game for ranking TV show episodes
Over this Christmas break, while discussing the best episodes of Frasier with my mother (as we tend to do when I get to see her), I thought about coming up with something that's less arbitrary than 1-10 ratings. The result is TV Sort. It just uses a sorting algorithm, but... it's human powered. When the algorithm needs to compare two items, it asks you to compare them, and with that you end up with a full, thoroughly sorted episode list. It uses TMDB, IMDB, and Wikipedia to extract episode information for any show, to help jog your memory when making episode comparisons. It was a fun little experiment. And finally, I know -exactly- what I think the best and worst episodes are.[0] Would love to hear your feedback, this is my first Show HN. ;) Edit: I wrote a whole blog post about what went into making it, if anyone wants to read more of the technical detail behind it.[1] [0]: ht
Why it failed: Over this Christmas break, while discussing the best episodes of Frasier with my mother (as we tend to do when I get to see her), I thought about coming up with something that's less arbitrary than 1-10 ratings. The result is TV Sort. It just uses a sorting algorithm, but...
pocketarc
- startupShut down2024
Ask HN: How to deploy money effectively to save time and build a business?
Starting a company is a lot of work and requires focus on things that are most important for pushing the business forward. It can be easy to waste time on things that can be done as effectively by other people. * What types of activities, both business and personal, have you found to be effective to pay others to do? * How do you choose what tasks to do yourself and what to delegate? * How do you navigate getting high quality help versus saving money? * How do you find people you can trust? * How much do you value your time (e.g. I'll spend $20 to save an hour of my time)? A few examples: On the business side: * Taking slides and making them look professional, making a website, etc * Finances, taxes * Filtering through emails, and doing initial outreach to candidates Personal: * Cooking, cleaning, laundry * Shopping * Home repairs, car repair, etc For instance on home repairs, I
Why it failed: Starting a company is a lot of work and requires focus on things that are most important for pushing the business forward. It can be easy to waste time on things that can be done as effectively by other people. * What types of activities, both business and personal, have you foun
aga_ml
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Async tasks in 350 lines of C
Tasks are a primitive for asynchronous programming and an alternative to working with threads directly. Instead of creating a thread, performing work, then waiting on it using synchronization primitives, you only define a unit of work and let a scheduler decide when and where to execute it. The threads that the scheduler uses are created once and reused for many tasks throughout the program's lifetime. In most cases, creating and executing a task requires not even a single syscall and is a significantly faster operation than creating a thread, resulting in lower latency. Furthermore, tasks from different subsystems can be automatically interleaved by the scheduler, which is difficult to achieve manually with threads without communication between the subsystems. The library is written in standard C11 and only depends on the C POSIX library. It is designed to be easy to integrate into
Why it failed: Tasks are a primitive for asynchronous programming and an alternative to working with threads directly. Instead of creating a thread, performing work, then waiting on it using synchronization primitives, you only define a unit of work and let a scheduler decide when and where to
rkaehn
- startupShut down2024
Ask HN: How did you replace Teleport?
Teleport is a good software if you can't configure your SSH servers with Kerberos, or can't figure out Kubernetes' millions of authentication and authorisations solutions. Unfortunately, the Teleport open-source version has been discontinued and the free version doesn't allow companies above 100 employees or with more than 10 million dollars of revenue per year. Fair enough, everyone should live well. But Teleport Enterprise is very expensive and I have been priced out. I don't know if I can share the price behind the "contact sales" but if you wonder about the price, you probably are too poor. In my case, it's quite a few orders of magnitude more than the time Teleport saves me. So, I have been looking for a replacement that is open-source and likely to stay open-source for a while. I can pay for it, but I don't have a "contact us"
Why it failed: Teleport is a good software if you can't configure your SSH servers with Kerberos, or can't figure out Kubernetes' millions of authentication and authorisations solutions. Unfortunately, the Teleport open-source version has been discontinued and the free version do
speedgoose
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Open Sourcing Our No-Code WebXR Editor After 5 Years of Development
Transfer Thought is a No-Code platform that makes it so anyone can build VR apps directly in their browser. We started this company part-time, building it during commutes to and from work on the train. Over the last 5 years, we've experienced many ups and downs: - Gained early customers - Quit our day jobs - Secured angel funding - Survived with a short runway - Accepted into Techstars Chicago - Survived with a short runway (again) - Landed our biggest client ever, a Fortune 100 company - Despite our highest revenue, our burn rate caught up to us We looked at different ways to wind down the company and ultimately felt open sourcing the platform was the best way to do right by our customers. Now, anyone who is interested in starting a VR company or just building an app can pick up where we left off. I'm excited about this space, if you need help with a VR app, or want to talk te
Why it failed: Transfer Thought is a No-Code platform that makes it so anyone can build VR apps directly in their browser. We started this company part-time, building it during commutes to and from work on the train. Over the last 5 years, we've experienced many ups and downs: - Gained ear
keenanTT
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Managed Redux Toolkit: Autogenerate Your RTK Definitions
Redux Toolkit (RTK) provides a lot of primitives to build performant frontend applications. Celestial generates RTK code for your backend (with additional features), exposing an intuitive hook-based API. So you can have all the benefits of RTK without having to familiarise yourself with the underlying framework. Essentially, we write the backend wiring code for your frontend. You get simple-to-use hooks, which implement advanced backend sync & state management patterns. You also get a fast, snappy application out-of-the box. You can also think about it like this: Celestial generates a unified state layer that contains your server state and any other state that you decide to store. It exposes hooks to interact with the state, while constantly keeping client state in sync with the backend. Your UI simply plugs into the state layer using a hook-based API to manage data flow for your web
Why it failed: Redux Toolkit (RTK) provides a lot of primitives to build performant frontend applications. Celestial generates RTK code for your backend (with additional features), exposing an intuitive hook-based API. So you can have all the benefits of RTK without having to familiarise yourse
KritiKay
- startupShut down2024
What do I want? (SWE Burnout)
Very sorry for the long post. I'm in a sad mood. I'm really tired of SWE jobs for the typical reasons. Office politics, too much bureaucracy to do my job. I talked to a recruiter today who called me about a 6 month contract, and instead of allowing me to talk about my experience he wanted to ask why I've done so many contracts. It's so hypocritical. People who quit every 1-2 years aren't called job hoppers, but contractors are the ones that have to answer to the industries retention problem. But the reason contracts are so common is because there are so many job hoppers. And because there are so many job hoppers, there's more contract than full time. I put no blame on the engineers btw, we're in this heap together. I have a second career. I have a class A CDL, but there are more physical reasons I don't do these jobs anymore. I've been driving
Why it failed: Very sorry for the long post. I'm in a sad mood. I'm really tired of SWE jobs for the typical reasons. Office politics, too much bureaucracy to do my job. I talked to a recruiter today who called me about a 6 month contract, and instead of allowing me to talk about my e
chillinOverHere
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Excel to Python Compiler
We (me and @aarondia) built a tool to help you turn psuedo-software Excel files into real-software Python. Ideally, Pyoneer helps you automate your manual Excel processes. You can try it today here: https://pyoneer.ai . How it works: 1. You upload an Excel file 2. We statically parse the Excel file and build a dependency graph of all the cells, tables, formulas, and pivots. 3. We do a graph traversal, and translate nodes as we hit them. We use OpenAI APIs to translate formulas. There’s a bunch of extra work here — because even with the best prompt engineering a fella like me can do, OpenAI sucks at translating formulas (primarily because it doesn’t know what datatypes its dealing with). We augment this translation with a mapping from ranges to variable names and types, which in our experience can improve the percentage of correctly translatable formulas by about 5x. 4. We gener
Why it failed: We (me and @aarondia) built a tool to help you turn psuedo-software Excel files into real-software Python. Ideally, Pyoneer helps you automate your manual Excel processes. You can try it today here: https://pyoneer.ai . How it works: 1. You upload an Excel file 2. We st
narush
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: I made the slowest, most expensive GPT
This is another one of my automate-my-life projects - I'm constantly asking the same question to different AIs since there's always the hope of getting a better answer somewhere else. Maybe ChatGPT's answer is too short, so I ask Perplexity. But I realize that's hallucinated, so I try Gemini. That answer sounds right, but I cross-reference with Claude just to make sure. This doesn't really apply to math/coding (where o1 or Gemini can probably one-shot an excellent response), but more to online search, where information is more fluid and there's no "right" search engine + text restructuring + model combination every time. Even o1 doesn't have online search, so it's obviously a hard problem to solve. An example is something like "best ski resorts in the US", which will get a different response from every GPT, but most of thei
Why it failed: This is another one of my automate-my-life projects - I'm constantly asking the same question to different AIs since there's always the hope of getting a better answer somewhere else. Maybe ChatGPT's answer is too short, so I ask Perplexity. But I realize that'
wluk
- startupShut down2024
Launch HN: Promi (YC S24) – AI-powered ecommerce discounts
We’re Peter and Jiaxin, and we’re building Promi ( https://www.usepromi.com ). Promi uses AI to optimize retail ecommerce discounts across products and customers (think new customer discounts, clearance sales, holiday sales, etc.). Here’s a quick video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHTw9VH8bCw Discounts have traditionally been a bit of the ‘wild west’ of pricing. Optimization techniques at even the largest merchants are heavily manual. Product level discounting decisions are distributed among operations or category managers, and store-wide discounts are often set by marketers. Typically they rely on order history, look at competitor discounts, or find prior discount performance to inform their decision. But there’s not a lot of science behind choosing the discount, and teams don’t have the time or means to optimize it at a granular level - i.e. by pro
Why it failed: We’re Peter and Jiaxin, and we’re building Promi ( https://www.usepromi.com ). Promi uses AI to optimize retail ecommerce discounts across products and customers (think new customer discounts, clearance sales, holiday sales, etc.). Here’s a quick video overview: https:&
pmoot
- startupShut down2023
Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer
Hi, small SaaS founder here (tardis.dev) - I've been heavy Cloudflare Workers user (currently 4 billions requests & 1PB of data per month) for about 4 years already and today at 00:00 UTC without any warning my account was restricted, both website and APIs are down or very very slow to respond/time out, customers are angry obviously. I confirmed with support that "hmm, I see that your zone seems like being restricted due to 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content, see that there's high JSON data transfer". - which is bit strange as I'm using workers which have different terms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 (confirmed by their CTO)...anyways I get it, perhaps I pay too little and should be on enterprise plan already, but when I got approached by Cloudflare sales team I explicitly asked if I can still be on pay as you go&
Why it failed: Hi, small SaaS founder here (tardis.dev) - I've been heavy Cloudflare Workers user (currently 4 billions requests & 1PB of data per month) for about 4 years already and today at 00:00 UTC without any warning my account was restricted, both website and APIs are down or ve
tardis_thad
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Gdańsk AI – full stack AI voice chatbot
Hi! It's a complete product with integrations to Auth0, OpenAI, Google Cloud and Stripe, which consists of Next.js Web App, Node.js + Express Web API and Python + FastAPI AI API I've built this software, because I wanted to make money by selling tokens to enable users talking with the chatbot. But I think Google / Apple will include such AI-powered assistant in their products soon, so nobody will pay me for using it So I open source the product today and share it as a GNU GPL-2 licensed software I'm happy to assist in case if something is unclear or requires additional docs and answer any questions about Gdańsk AI :) Thanks
Why it failed: Hi! It's a complete product with integrations to Auth0, OpenAI, Google Cloud and Stripe, which consists of Next.js Web App, Node.js + Express Web API and Python + FastAPI AI API I've built this software, because I wanted to make money by selling tokens to enable users t
yu3zhou4
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Should I sign a pay cut agreement?
Hi! My employer recently announced a 10% pay cut across the board. Where I live(South Africa), employee consent is required. The company sent out a document asking us to sign in agreement. ---- This is the state of things now: * Company laid an unknown number of employees off, and laid them off without letting employees know until a week later in a meeting where they announced pay cuts * The company is pretty much full remote and the office is a nice-to-have. It is in a very expensive part of town. * Lunches once a week are catered at the office * I asked what happens if one were not to sign, and the response was "Oh, we haven't thought about that. We're hoping that everyone pulls together." * The situation will be reviewed quarterly * Company says they don't expect it to last very long, also citing this for why they kept the office ---- A few things stand out to
Why it failed: Hi! My employer recently announced a 10% pay cut across the board. Where I live(South Africa), employee consent is required. The company sent out a document asking us to sign in agreement. ---- This is the state of things now: * Company laid an unknown number of employees off, an
folivore
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
Hi! We’re Nikhil and Alek, founders of Pynecone ( https://pynecone.io ), an open source framework to build web apps in pure Python. This can be anything from a small data science/internal app to a large multi-page web app. Once your app is built, you can deploy your app with a single command to our hosting service (coming soon!), or self-host with your preferred provider. Our Github is: https://github.com/pynecone-io/pynecone Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Webdev is one of the most popular applications of programming. So why can’t we make full-stack web apps using just Python? We worked in the AI/infra space and saw that even skilled engineers who wanted to make web apps but didn’t know traditional frontend tools like Javascript or React found it overwhelming and time consuming to learn. On the other hand, no
Why it failed: Hi! We’re Nikhil and Alek, founders of Pynecone ( https://pynecone.io ), an open source framework to build web apps in pure Python. This can be anything from a small data science/internal app to a large multi-page web app. Once your app is built, you can deploy you
picklelo
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Cptn.io – open-source integration platform
Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform( https://cptn.io ). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn . I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a monitoring platform called DevRaven. Unfortunately the product did not takeoff as expected. That story is for another day. But during the course of building the product, I have built several integrations leveraging MQs and Cloud Functions. While building and deploying Cloud Functions for happy paths is easy, I had to monitor logs for failures, build retry mechanisms or manually process failed events, keep instances running to prevent cold start timeouts. It can also get expensive with charges for MQs, server time for running cloud functions etc and costs can be unpredictable. I thought of building a platform whe
Why it failed: Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform( https://cptn.io ). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn . I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a
kc10
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Chainloop, A Software Supply Chain Attestation solution devs won't hate
Hi, my name is Miguel and I am very happy to share what's been months worth of work :) The project has rough edges for sure, but any early feedback, comments or concerns are appreciated! === The Problem === You work on the Security and Operations (SecOps) team in charge of your organization's Software Supply Chain Security. You feel pretty good about the state of things already, your developer teams are signing their commits, deliverables, scanning for vulnerabilities,… Life is good! Then you realize that you are not compliant with the latest security requirements. You get referred to slsa.dev and are told that you need to be at least level 3, whatever that means! Aha! I “just” need to implement an attestation and artifact layer in our Software Supply Chain, which you complete after a couple of months of work. Now to the easy part (or what you think). To make the developer team
Why it failed: Hi, my name is Miguel and I am very happy to share what's been months worth of work :) The project has rough edges for sure, but any early feedback, comments or concerns are appreciated! === The Problem === You work on the Security and Operations (SecOps) team in charge of y
migmartri
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Quadratic – Open-Source Spreadsheet with Python, AI (WASM and WebGL)
Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic ( https://QuadraticHQ.com ), an open-source spreadsheet application that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), AI Prompts, and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a result, you can pinch and zoom to navigate large data sets, and everything renders smoothly at 60fps. Our vision is to build a place where your team can collaborate on data analysis. You can write Python, AI Prompts, and Formulas in one spreadsheet feeding each other data and updating automatically. Quadratic is built using WebGL and Rust WASM. To render a large grid of cells smoothly, we tile the spreadsheet similar to google maps. If you are interested in the technical details, check us out on GitHub ( https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic/ ) You can use AI to help you write Python a
Why it failed: Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic ( https://QuadraticHQ.com ), an open-source spreadsheet application that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), AI Prompts, and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a
davidkircos
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Did anyone write a book in Nano?
I discovered that some people deliberately choose to write stories in terminal-based text-editors like Nano or Vim, because it forces you to spend more time on honing the story instead of being distracted by formatting and other fancy features. I'm attracted to this idea, in the same way that the dwm window manager forces me to focus my attention. I was curious to know if anyone here actually did that, and what their experience was. Did it make you more productive? Was the editing process a mess? Any anecdotes?
Why it failed: I discovered that some people deliberately choose to write stories in terminal-based text-editors like Nano or Vim, because it forces you to spend more time on honing the story instead of being distracted by formatting and other fancy features. I'm attracted to this idea, in
_ixdf
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless
I have a lot of experience with side-projects and startups. I will briefly explain my experience. I'm coming from small eastern European country, so my perspective on everything might be different. 1. My country is too small and market is small. You can do something here, but everything is so limited that it's terrible. 3.5M people and then when you target certain people who wants your product or service or app or website, you get super small amount of people 2. The Balkans (group of countries around my country where people speak the same language) is a better story, but every nation is so isolated. I asked yourself, how often do I use products/app/websites from the other countries and vice versa? Very rarely. Every country is in its own bubble. 3. European market. Every country has its own language, culture, mentality, etc. it's hard to get into those countries
Why it failed: I have a lot of experience with side-projects and startups. I will briefly explain my experience. I'm coming from small eastern European country, so my perspective on everything might be different. 1. My country is too small and market is small. You can do something here, bu
superdario
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: My startup failed, now what?
I was a non-tech cofounder of a hard tech startup that raised a seed round of 500K. The startup failed for a bunch of reasons unrelated to this topic after 2 years of existence. Now I need to get a job, and I have no idea what kind of job I am qualified to get in the tech world. Before the startup I have one brief business development stint but nothing major, and a degree from a prestigious university. I don't even know where to start regarding what positions I can get? I can certainly try business development again, but I want to be more involved in the product.
Why it failed: I was a non-tech cofounder of a hard tech startup that raised a seed round of 500K. The startup failed for a bunch of reasons unrelated to this topic after 2 years of existence. Now I need to get a job, and I have no idea what kind of job I am qualified to get in the tech world.
quotz
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file?
I recall seeing a guide on what to put in a text file so that surviving family have an easier time dealing with all of your loose ends, e.g., digital accounts, safe deposit boxes, utilities, etc. Do any of you have thoughts on what to put in a file like this? Here is a rough list of things: - Will - Living trust - Power of attorney - Life insurance policy - Birth certificate - Marriage license - Bank and credit card accounts - Loan documents - Automobile titles - Property deeds - Copies of keys to automobiles, safe deposit boxes, etc. - Account and device passwords
Why it failed: I recall seeing a guide on what to put in a text file so that surviving family have an easier time dealing with all of your loose ends, e.g., digital accounts, safe deposit boxes, utilities, etc. Do any of you have thoughts on what to put in a file like this? Here is a rough list
cjohnson318