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.
496 solutions
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: I wrote an email app that accepts only one sender per inbox
Infinite inboxes, including prefixes where you don't have to create inboxes before you use them -- they self create when you add a suffix. Three types of inboxes: - One sender. Locks to the first domain to send email (except gmail, outlook, etc where it locks to an email account for obivous reasons. It bounces everyone else. - Temporary. Lasts for a while (24h, 7days, etc) then bounces. Received messages stay or go as per your choice. - Prefix. The most powerful. Declare a prefix like "service" and then invent any suffix, like "service-netflix" or "service$bank" and it creates a new one-sender inbox locked to whoever wrote first. Bring you own domain. Bring your own AI (MCP server ready). Forwarding. Please help me test it.
Why it failed: Infinite inboxes, including prefixes where you don't have to create inboxes before you use them -- they self create when you add a suffix. Three types of inboxes: - One sender. Locks to the first domain to send email (except gmail, outlook, etc where it locks to an email acc
edpin2000
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Bramble – Local-first password manager
I'm currently working on Bramble, an open source password manager with P2P cross-device sync. Initially I released the Chrome extension, but recently I also published the Android app and iOS is pending Apple's approval. Besides that, the latest version also includes passkey storage for all platforms! About Bramble: It aims to be as feature-rich as all popular and a replacement for cloud-based providers. I don't think we need to store our data in the cloud and be at the whims of companies raising their prices every year. There's always a breach and then we find out that some fields aren't encrypted, metadata is visible, and so on. I'm frustrated with this and the increasing lack of transparency during these breaches. The P2P sync in Bramble uses a Nostr relay (which can be self-hosted) to keep your devices in sync. The relay just introduces the devices to eac
Why it failed: I'm currently working on Bramble, an open source password manager with P2P cross-device sync. Initially I released the Chrome extension, but recently I also published the Android app and iOS is pending Apple's approval. Besides that, the latest version also includes pas
MegagramEnjoyer
- startupShut down2026
Meta problem with URPF our bundle in Boca raton
Meta has a problem in its clusters in Boca Raton, Miami; this is affecting the MNA content delivery network and direct content consumption. This has a regional impact in Latin America, since so far most non-cacheable content is consumed from the clusters in Florida. The impact is traceable via ICMP, but also reproducible via TCP and difficult to measure via UDP. This is why monitoring tools are misleading: there is no “slowness” resulting from interface saturation; instead, there is data corruption where packets are discarded at the interface level. Therefore, if network performance is measured using those same data points, it won’t work and you won’t see any alerts. The issue can also be replicated from the looking glass. In fact, I will attach images below, although you can also see them on the website attached to the post, as well as a more specific report There is packet loss and pro
Why it failed: Meta has a problem in its clusters in Boca Raton, Miami; this is affecting the MNA content delivery network and direct content consumption. This has a regional impact in Latin America, since so far most non-cacheable content is consumed from the clusters in Florida. The impact is
synthesis5x
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
It has been 120 hours (5 days) since the internet shutdown in Iran began. While international phone calls have started working again, data remains blocked. I am looking for technical solutions to establish resilient, long-term communication channels that can bypass such shutdowns. What are the most viable options for peer-to-peer messaging, mesh networks, or satellite-based solutions that don't rely on local ISP infrastructure?
Why it failed: It has been 120 hours (5 days) since the internet shutdown in Iran began. While international phone calls have started working again, data remains blocked. I am looking for technical solutions to establish resilient, long-term communication channels that can bypass such shutdowns
us321
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Airbyte Agents – context for agents across multiple data sources
I’m Michel, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte ( https://airbyte.com/ ). We’ve spent the last six years building data connectors. Today we're launching Airbyte Agents ( https://docs.airbyte.com/ai-agents/ ), a unified data layer for agents to discover information and take action across operational systems. Here’s a quick walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZosDytyf1fg As agents move into real workflows, they need access to more tools (e.g. Slack, Salesforce, Linear). That means a ton of API plumbing: authentication, pagination, filters, handling schema, and matching entities across systems. Most MCPs don’t fix this. They’re thin wrappers over APIs, so agents inherit their weak primitives and still get it wrong most of the time, especially when working across tools. An even deeper issue is that APIs assume you already know what to
Why it failed: I’m Michel, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte ( https://airbyte.com/ ). We’ve spent the last six years building data connectors. Today we're launching Airbyte Agents ( https://docs.airbyte.com/ai-agents/ ), a unified data layer for agents to di
mtricot
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: Anyone else feeling uneasy with the latest developments in AI?
I'm feeling extremely depressed and anxious lately. After seeing Astra saturating ARC-AGI-3 and blowing through many other benchmarks, it's hard to believe we won't have a strong form of AGI by the end of this year, or the next one at the latest. I don't understand why we're not seeing a MASSIVE clamor for a pause in the further development of AI strength. Even if we don't know how to coordinate and enforce such a pause yet (at the multi-nation level), it seems we're not spending any effort in figuring how to. I see a lot of people dismissing warnings from the frontier companies themselves as nothing but "marketing and generating hype". I myself can't call "marketing and hype" the kind of capability I see before my very eyes and interact with every day, at work and in everyday life otherwise. Posts like the recent "An Alien
Why it failed: I'm feeling extremely depressed and anxious lately. After seeing Astra saturating ARC-AGI-3 and blowing through many other benchmarks, it's hard to believe we won't have a strong form of AGI by the end of this year, or the next one at the latest. I don't under
sensitivekt9q3
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Fast, native Mac file manager (filters, fuzzy find, 9 MB, no Electron)
My Downloads folder had been left unkept for a really long time and cleaning it up using Finder was quite cumbersome. So I started creating a simple app to help me filter out and delete or move the files in the folder. It started out very basic and the filtering options genuinely helped me clean out the Downloads folder, then as I thought of more features I would like to see in a file manager I started to add them. Some of the features are: - Fuzzy go to folder/file where you only need to write a few letters of a full path, get suggestions and can jump to the correct path instantly - Hover over a file to preview an image or PDF without opening it - Dual-pane view and tabs that remember selected filters - Command palette to find actions fast - Batch rename (with regex support and presets for common operations), image conversion (HEIC/WebP/AVIF to JPG/PNG), zip creation
Why it failed: My Downloads folder had been left unkept for a really long time and cleaning it up using Finder was quite cumbersome. So I started creating a simple app to help me filter out and delete or move the files in the folder. It started out very basic and the filtering options genuinely
whimbyte
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: An inside view of Montana's new biotech law
Montana passed a law called SB535. It builds on right-to-try (pre-approval access with informed consent, Phase 1 safety data etc.) but goes much further, fixing problems with those laws. Alex Tabarrok called it "the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime" ( https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/mo... ). Was posted here but died in /new ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559525 ). The mods suggested this post. I contributed ideas to the law and am now implementing it through my company. I invested in biotech for years and watched companies struggle. I built the biotech ecosystem in Prospera as an alternative, concluded it was too early, and now think Montana is the best place to prove this. Why this exists: When FDA approves a bad drug, heads roll. When it delays a good one,
Why it failed: Montana passed a law called SB535. It builds on right-to-try (pre-approval access with informed consent, Phase 1 safety data etc.) but goes much further, fixing problems with those laws. Alex Tabarrok called it "the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my
niklas_anzinger
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models – smallest less than 25MB
Kitten TTS ( https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS ) is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We had a thread last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807868 . Today we're releasing three new models with 80M, 40M and 14M parameters. The largest model (80M) has the highest quality. The 14M variant reaches new SOTA in expressivity among similar sized models, despite being <25MB in size. This release is a major upgrade from the previous one and supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. Here's a short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge3u5qblqZA . Most models are quantized to int8 + fp16, and they use ONNX for runtime. Our models are designed to run anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, b
Why it failed: Kitten TTS ( https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS ) is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We had a thread last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807868 . Today we'
rohan_joshi
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Startup sci-fi novel that took me 5 years to write
It started after reading Stephen King's "On Writing" where he likened the art of writing as the unearthing of an archeological site after you stumbled upon a unique bone of a story. His advice was to choose a domain you are deeply intimate with. For me, I've been a struggling startup founder for 15 years—enough material to inspire a novel. A 1,000-word writing exercise turned into a complete 125k-word manuscript over the course of a year. In year 1, I learned the sheer joy of unencumbered creative flow and authentic expression. A similar flow I used to get from coding (and more recently vibe coding). What made it effortless was a mindset that I was writing for the sake of it, not with the intention of publishing. After a year of keeping it close to my chest, I decided to show it to a few close friends. They liked some of it, destroyed some of it. Some ultimately encou
Why it failed: It started after reading Stephen King's "On Writing" where he likened the art of writing as the unearthing of an archeological site after you stumbled upon a unique bone of a story. His advice was to choose a domain you are deeply intimate with. For me, I've b
mck-
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: Client took over development by vibe coding. What to do?
I’ve worked on a project for one year now, a marketplace web application for one of my clients. It involves a web shop frontend, integration with suppliers, payment platforms, product management, stock syncing, and much more. I built the project from scratch with open source components, guided other developers on the project, and was leading all the technical decisions. Last year I started using LLM’s for cumbersome tasks, and since the beginning of this year I started working with Claude Code to implement features. Still, I always need to think about the implementation, and actively direct and correct the bot. As many of you will know, it can speed up development, but I still need to use my more than ten years of experience as a developer. I thought the project for my client would be safe. This changed when they started developing some of their own, much smaller and simpler projects on
Why it failed: I’ve worked on a project for one year now, a marketplace web application for one of my clients. It involves a web shop frontend, integration with suppliers, payment platforms, product management, stock syncing, and much more. I built the project from scratch with open source comp
piscator
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party
I’ve been a NameCheap customer for 13 years. I’ve also helped out an old college club paying for a .com they use (that is registered to me under my name, address, and phone number). During a recent leadership transition, the incoming club lead wanted to make changes to the DNS and didn’t know to contact me. They figured out the domain name was parked at NameCheap, so they initiated a password reset using the domain name. I got a password reset email and immediately filed a NameCheap support ticket saying “I did not initiate this”. They called me to verify I was the one who filed the ticket, and then followed up with a canned email with tips like check your anti-virus. The incoming club leader was persistent though, and called NameCheap support. He convinced them the domain registered in my name and address really belonged to his club, and with no verification or validation whatsoever, Na
Why it failed: I’ve been a NameCheap customer for 13 years. I’ve also helped out an old college club paying for a .com they use (that is registered to me under my name, address, and phone number). During a recent leadership transition, the incoming club lead wanted to make changes to the DNS an
Thrashed
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Halo 3's Guardian, playable in the browser, as my personal website
I've never had a personal website, and I didn't want to make a resume/portfolio site, so I rebuilt Guardian and hid a treasure hunt through my life inside it. You start in the Halo 3 main menu, go through the lobby, spawn in the map, and explore. There are photos, stories, quests, mini-games, and Easter eggs scattered around. Movement is via WASD and mouse, no signup. Guardian was my third place growing up. Starting in 9th grade, my friends and I would get home after school, get on Halo, and hang out in a Guardian free-for-all with MLG settings until everyone came online, then play customs or ranked for hours. On weekends we'd bring our Xboxes and monitors to each other's houses, stay up all night, and play in local tournaments. Guardian was probably the closest thing I had to a digital home, so I wanted my site to live there. Playing it and hearing the theme mus
Why it failed: I've never had a personal website, and I didn't want to make a resume/portfolio site, so I rebuilt Guardian and hid a treasure hunt through my life inside it. You start in the Halo 3 main menu, go through the lobby, spawn in the map, and explore. There are photos,
runshouse
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Mission Control – Open-source task management for AI agents
I've been delegating work to Claude Code for the past few months, and it's been genuinely transformative—but managing multiple agents doing different things became chaos. No tool existed for this workflow, so I built one. The Problem When you're working with AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf), you end up in a weird situation: - You have tasks scattered across your head, Slack, email, and the CLI - Agents need clear work items, context, and role-specific instructions - You have no visibility into what agents are actually doing - Failed tasks just... disappear. No retry, no notification - Each agent context-switches constantly because you're hand-feeding them work I was manually shepherding agents, copying task descriptions, restarting failed sessions, and losing track of what needed done next. It felt like hiring expensive contractors but managing them like a di
Why it failed: I've been delegating work to Claude Code for the past few months, and it's been genuinely transformative—but managing multiple agents doing different things became chaos. No tool existed for this workflow, so I built one. The Problem When you're working with AI age
meisnerd
- startupShut down2026
Alternative to Internet Archive
Now; i use the archive to archive my prolithic output of music. (i have over 300 albums.) The music is of my own creation. Since the DDoS attack of 2024; Archive has been a hit or miss on the uploading factors. And many of my releases have specific dates for release. With the uncertainty of the uploads happening it causes me to break focus on working with music and watch the upload to make sure there isn't a 503 happening each file. (which sometimes happens frequently.) I am in search of a similar uploading process with an unlimited amount of uploads. I don't want to make money off of my music. I don't want to individually input over 2000 songs; including their metadata and other factors. Many sites that we both have heard of; have various limitations or are not privacy friendly platforms ran by a company that seeks to be Big Brother from 1984 and watch us in a Brave New W
Why it failed: Now; i use the archive to archive my prolithic output of music. (i have over 300 albums.) The music is of my own creation. Since the DDoS attack of 2024; Archive has been a hit or miss on the uploading factors. And many of my releases have specific dates for release. With the unc
earworms
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: The Google Tenor GIF API has been shut down
No public announcement. Just quietly added to killed by google. Step 2 just fails with an error: https://developers.google.com/tenor/guides/quickstart Hello Tenor API customer, We're writing to inform you about the deprecation of the Tenor API offering on June 30, 2026. We are making this change to focus our resources on enhancing the main Tenor experience. The Tenor API has been a valuable tool for many developers. We sincerely appreciate your partnership and the innovative ways you have integrated Tenor into your applications. Your contributions have helped shape the Tenor ecosystem. What you need to know Key Dates: Starting January 13, 2026, New API key sign-ups and new integrations will no longer be allowed On June 30, 2026, any API or Ads Distribution Agreements you have with Tenor will be terminated The Tenor API will continue to work for existing inte
Why it failed: No public announcement. Just quietly added to killed by google. Step 2 just fails with an error: https://developers.google.com/tenor/guides/quickstart Hello Tenor API customer, We're writing to inform you about the deprecation of the Tenor API offeri
dfajgljsldkjag
- startupShut down2026
Roblox parental controls are a dystopian security disaster
My 14 year old daughter got hacked by someone who was able to add themselves as a "linked parent" to her account. I'm not even sure that this person got ahold of her password in the first place. All this happened on Wednesday morning (6/24/26) but on the day it happened I did not recieve a single email about any of this even though the account is tied to my email address (verified). Usually if there is a new log in on an unrecognized device I would have gotten an email about it, but nothing was sent on 6/24 to me. I suspect that even if two factor authentication was already added to her account it would have done nothing, because there was a two factor authentication passkey added to her account which was definitely not set up by her. But by using that newly created authentication passkey the "linked parent" was clearly able to log into her account
Why it failed: My 14 year old daughter got hacked by someone who was able to add themselves as a "linked parent" to her account. I'm not even sure that this person got ahold of her password in the first place. All this happened on Wednesday morning (6/24/26) but on the
notsure357
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: AI memory with biological decay (52% recall)
Most RAG setups fail because they treat memory like a static filing cabinet. When every transient bug fix or abandoned rule is stored forever, the context window eventually chokes on noise, spiking token costs and degrading the agent's reasoning. This implementation experiments with a biological approach by using the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve to manage context as a living substrate. Memories are assigned a "strength" score where each recall reinforces the data and flattens its decay curve (spaced repetition), while unused data eventually hits a threshold and is pruned. To solve the "logical neighbor" problem where semantic search misses relevant but non-similar nodes, a graph layer is layered over the vector store. Benchmarked against the LoCoMo dataset, this reached 52% Recall@5, nearly double the accuracy of stateless vector stores, while cutting token waste
Why it failed: Most RAG setups fail because they treat memory like a static filing cabinet. When every transient bug fix or abandoned rule is stored forever, the context window eventually chokes on noise, spiking token costs and degrading the agent's reasoning. This implementation experime
SachitRafa
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Libretto – Making AI browser automations deterministic
Libretto ( https://libretto.sh ) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding agents to generate real scripts you can inspect, run, and debug”. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cDpIntmHAM . Docs start at https://libretto.sh/docs/get-started/introduction . We spent a year building and maintaining browser automations for EHR and payer portal integrations at our healthcare startup. Building these automations and debugging failed ones was incredibly time-consuming. There’s lots of tools that use runtime AI like Browseruse and Stagehand which we tried, but (1) they’re reliant on custom DOM parsing that's unreliable on older and complicate
Why it failed: Libretto ( https://libretto.sh ) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding age
muchael
- startupShut down2026
Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport
Latest archive link: https://archive.is/Qdq4x
Why it failed: Latest archive link: https://archive.is/Qdq4x
edward
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein
Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the slingshots line up), and it ends on Einstein — gravity as curved spacetime, the classic rubber-sheet well. What's real: every body uses its real radius/mass and J2000 orbital elements; positions come from solving Kepler's equation each frame. You can toggle to a
Why it failed: Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and th
qunabu
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Dari-docs – Optimize your docs using parallel coding agents
It’s well known at this point that documentation needs to be optimized for AI agents - we’re all pointing our Claude Code / Codex / Pi agents at documentation, and expecting the models to figure out how to implement a product. This, however, changes the entire optimization problem when writing documentation. Good documentation now becomes more objective - you are solving the very concrete problem: can a dumb harness running the dumbest model implement this reliably? Humans can typically compensate for inconsistent terminology or scattered context across pages, but for agents, this often will waste time (or even just completely confuse the agent). We’ve been building a small project around this called dari-docs: users can upload their documentation via website or CLI and run agents across different providers to see where they falter. You can upload your documentation, feed a lis
Why it failed: It’s well known at this point that documentation needs to be optimized for AI agents - we’re all pointing our Claude Code / Codex / Pi agents at documentation, and expecting the models to figure out how to implement a product. This, however, changes the entire optimizat
byhong03
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: Anthropic won't reset usage limits for those who downgraded
On March 27, I contacted Anthropic Support reporting I hit usage limits very early. On 13 April, I emailed again asking about usage issues (like many others): I started that Monday with 72% of my usage used. On 17 April, after three weeks of the first open support thread, disappointed in their replies to the second, and exactly six days before their published post-mortem and their promise to reset usage limits, I downgraded my account from Max to Pro, and updated the support thread with that info. > Today we are resetting usage limits for all subscribers. -- Yesterday's post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem I followed up today to ask if this applied to me, noting, > Does this [reset usage promise] apply to my account? And how many weeks worth of usage is reset, please? I note there was ongoing impact for significant time. Their rep
Why it failed: On March 27, I contacted Anthropic Support reporting I hit usage limits very early. On 13 April, I emailed again asking about usage issues (like many others): I started that Monday with 72% of my usage used. On 17 April, after three weeks of the first open support thread, disappo
vintagedave
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Artifact Keeper – Open-Source Artifactory/Nexus Alternative in Rust
I'm a software engineer who keeps getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it. I recently moved into a Lead DevOps Engineer role writing tooling to automate a lot of the pain away. On my own time outside of work, I built Artifact Keeper — a self-hosted artifact registry that supports 45+ package formats. Security scanning, SSO, replication, WASM plugins — it's all in the MIT-licensed release. No enterprise tier. No feature gates. No surprise invoices. Your package managers — pip, npm, docker, cargo, helm, go, all of them — talk directly to it using their native protocols. Security scanning with Trivy, Grype, and OpenSCAP is built in, with a policy engine that can quarantine bad artifacts before they hit your builds. And if you need a format it doesn't support yet, there's a WASM plugin system so you can add your own without forking the backend. Wh
Why it failed: I'm a software engineer who keeps getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it. I recently moved into a Lead DevOps Engineer role writing tooling to automate a lot of the pain away. On my own time outside of work, I built Artifact Keeper — a self-hosted a
bsgeraci