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.
3,100 solutions
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: Amazon delisted me – what do I do?
I'm at my wits end with big tech platforms. I run a popular photography product company (which was a Kickstarter project in 2014) [0] which gets a lot of love for its ability to help photographers take interesting images. But I'm continually running into walls with BigTechCos. I'm just coming off the end of having had my Instagram account deleted by Facebook because a graffiti artist and his trolls were able to flag my IG account and left me unable to appeal[1]. 20k followers, 4 years of work gone. My entire customer base is primarily on IG and they are shocked to find that I'm not; so I feel the pain every day and the fact that I'm no longer advertising on FB because of it is a loss-loss in my opinion. Can not explain how upsetting it is for me. To add insult to injury Amazon randomly delisted my product. I randomly received an email that they removed me [2]. I
Why it failed: I'm at my wits end with big tech platforms. I run a popular photography product company (which was a Kickstarter project in 2014) [0] which gets a lot of love for its ability to help photographers take interesting images. But I'm continually running into walls with BigT
nikkwong
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: How do you take care of your hands?
This question may seem like it's coming out of the blue but I realize that we as technology professionals use our hands in unique ways that lead to unique conditions, for example I suffer from hangnails a lot and I know RSI is a deep concern -- What are your ways of helping your hands deal with constant computer use?
Why it failed: This question may seem like it's coming out of the blue but I realize that we as technology professionals use our hands in unique ways that lead to unique conditions, for example I suffer from hangnails a lot and I know RSI is a deep concern -- What are your ways of helping
artsyca
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: How does someone in India access the internet when taken down?
Title is the question. I'm currently living in India, and want to understand what I can do to retain internet access when the government attempts to take it down. Currently, the government run ISP appears to be shutting down, while private ISPs have not yet. I understand systems, networks not so much. - What are terms I should google to get good information? - What technology is useful in this situation? Is there some way to access the internet still? - How do I most easily setup a mesh network for communication? - What books/manuals should I keep at hand?
Why it failed: Title is the question. I'm currently living in India, and want to understand what I can do to retain internet access when the government attempts to take it down. Currently, the government run ISP appears to be shutting down, while private ISPs have not yet. I understand sys
bollu
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: Are there any decent image hosts left?
With mixtape.moe shutting down, I'm not sure where to move to. What do you prefer to use?
Why it failed: With mixtape.moe shutting down, I'm not sure where to move to. What do you prefer to use?
lohszvu
- startupShut down2019
Launch HN: Termius (YC W19) – SSH client that works on desktop and mobile
We are Roman and Dmitry, co-founders of Termius ( https://termius.com ). Termius is an SSH client that works on desktop and mobile. The big difference with other SSH clients that Termius syncs data across devices using end-to-end encryption. DevOps, sysadmins, and network engineers benefit from using Termius because they can keep all the information for managing their servers in one secure place, e.g., snippets, connection strings, history, etc. Our product vision is to rebuild the command line experience around an engineer, not around the mainframe where it all started. For example, Termius will help engineers to safely keep information about their servers, shell commands, and terminal logs. This information will be accessible from any device and used to improve productivity, e.g., autocomplete commands in the terminal. Dmitry and I met when we both got our first job in a smal
Why it failed: We are Roman and Dmitry, co-founders of Termius ( https://termius.com ). Termius is an SSH client that works on desktop and mobile. The big difference with other SSH clients that Termius syncs data across devices using end-to-end encryption. DevOps, sysadmins, and netwo
rkudiyarov
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: How do you deal with atomicity in microservice environments?
We run a small SaaS where users are able to create accounts, submit billing information and upload/call ML artefacts. In order to not reinvent the wheel we use external services where possible: Auth0 for authentication, Stripe for handling billing, etc. For this question, I am considering this a 'microservices' architecture. I am aware that this definition will spark its own discussion, but I believe that the problem generalises to a lot of the other (better, more complete, etc.) microservice definitions. So please, bear with me. Now, in the lifecycle of a customer (createAccount, addBilling, deleteAccount, ...) at various points we expect operations to occur atomically. By which I mean (simplified) that upon creating a new account, I also need to ensure a customer is created in Stripe as well as register the user in Auth0 - but if either of these subtasks fail, the operat
Why it failed: We run a small SaaS where users are able to create accounts, submit billing information and upload/call ML artefacts. In order to not reinvent the wheel we use external services where possible: Auth0 for authentication, Stripe for handling billing, etc. For this question, I
c89X
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: What happens to failed founders?
What happens, longer-term, to the founders that fail? There's many forms of failure, according to PG [1] it's simply a matter of "keep going, don't get demoralized", but from my limited perspective (I've never started a startup) it's more complicated than that, you can also literally run out of money (either personally, or as a company not getting more investment), or you can rationally decide to stop because the value proposition just isn't there in the market (noone needs it, or they need it but aren't willing to pay enough for it to sustain it). So, my conclusion is that startups sometimes fail for "good" reasons. What happens to founders afterwards? Do they start another startup? Do they continue in a "job" (career)? Do they start from scratch or move immediately into a management position? Are investors willing to inve
Why it failed: What happens, longer-term, to the founders that fail? There's many forms of failure, according to PG [1] it's simply a matter of "keep going, don't get demoralized", but from my limited perspective (I've never started a startup) it's more compli
tomp
- startupShut down2019
Launch HN: Quilt (YC W16) – A versioned data portal for S3
We're Aneesh and Kevin of Quilt ( https://open.quiltdata.com/ ). Quilt is a versioned data portal for S3 that makes it easier to share, discover, model, and decide based on data at scale. It consists of a Python client, web catalog, and lambda functions (all open source), plus a suite of backend containers and CloudFormation templates for businesses to run their own stacks. Public data are free. Private stacks are available for a flat monthly licensing fee. Try searching for anything on https://open.quiltdata.com/ and let us know how search works for you. We kind of surprised ourselves with a Google-like experience that returns primary data instead of links to web pages. We've got over 1M Jupyter notebooks, 100M Amazon reviews, and many more public S3 objects on over a dozen topics indexed in ElasticSearch. The best example, so far, of "S3 buc
Why it failed: We're Aneesh and Kevin of Quilt ( https://open.quiltdata.com/ ). Quilt is a versioned data portal for S3 that makes it easier to share, discover, model, and decide based on data at scale. It consists of a Python client, web catalog, and lambda functions (all o
akarve
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: Is it finally time to quit?
Using throwaway for obvious reasons... I'm feeling pretty bad. Until now (I'm 45, SE for 20 years) I've been able to be successful by working hard and never quitting but I think that personality trait has been my demise this time. I've worked full-time on a bootstrapped SaaS (niche academic domain) for over 3 years now. Went live on January 1 with 50 or so beta testers (free account and support for a year) which gave me plenty of encouragement, feedback, features, etc. Officially launched in July and everything has gone silent. I don't think I can convert any of the original testers as they've all gone to ground. I've produced some excellent content and tried my best to get it out there but it seems no one is interested (plenty of reads but no sharing, no likes, no backlinks, no conversions, no comments, nothing). I'm 100% sure we offer a way bette
Why it failed: Using throwaway for obvious reasons... I'm feeling pretty bad. Until now (I'm 45, SE for 20 years) I've been able to be successful by working hard and never quitting but I think that personality trait has been my demise this time. I've worked full-time on a bo
throw_your_boat
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: Why Services like Facebook ads/stripe are closing Venezuelan accounts?
Services like Facebook ads/stripe are wrongly closing Venezuelan accounts Venezuelan users have been reporting that different services such as facebook/instagram ads [1], heroku services [2], stripe atlas [3], sedo [4], and others, have been blocking venezuelan users and terminating accounts due to sactions that they didn't even care to read, the sactions are pretty explicit at targeting only individuals and officials of the government [5] and there is even licences that allow these services to operate [6] and a faq [7] where this is explained Even kayak.com (and all booking holdings sites) stopped accepting venezuela as a country of origin for flights, (see: https://i.imgur.com/nAouvUB.png) with a learn more link that goes to [5], and it makes no sense at all despite how much we need to buy plane tickets as people is fleeing the country. So, what's the
Why it failed: Services like Facebook ads/stripe are wrongly closing Venezuelan accounts Venezuelan users have been reporting that different services such as facebook/instagram ads [1], heroku services [2], stripe atlas [3], sedo [4], and others, have been blocking venezuelan users an
firekvz
- startupShut down2019
The Inquirer reaches end-of-life
The Inquirer is closing the curtains. This is sad, I loved their style. https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084741/the-inquirer-reaches-end-of-life
Why it failed: The Inquirer is closing the curtains. This is sad, I loved their style. https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084741/the-inquirer-reaches-end-of-life
FpUser
- startupShut down2019
Ask HN: Been self-employed for 18 years, am I hirable?
Throwaway account here, but been on HN for a long time. I'm going through a big life change, and this post is going to ramble a bit. But I need your help, HN. I've also been running my own business for a long time, mostly B2B consulting/development/training in the Microsoft/Office world. But I don't want to be pigeon-holed. For my own company, however, I've done a lot. I've written many, many chatbots with various functionalities for many platforms (some incorporating NLP—spacy.io is a particular favorite of mine); developed many non-throwaway, high quality apps/services with NodeJS, Python (Django), and Ruby (Rails); done video post-production and ingestion automation (latter via AWS, including Lambda); created many custom Wordpress plugins and themes; created more back-end mashups (NodeJS/Python/Ruby native, or via NodeRED/Hug
Why it failed: Throwaway account here, but been on HN for a long time. I'm going through a big life change, and this post is going to ramble a bit. But I need your help, HN. I've also been running my own business for a long time, mostly B2B consulting/development/training in
hirable_taway
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: What niche/forgotten technologies do you wish were more mainstream?
...Or you wish that we'd bring back or learn from more? There's a lot out there. Occasionally I bump into systems, languages, techniques, etc. that I haven't heard of, and which don't seem to be popular, for whatever reason. For example, how many people use Clean, the pure functional language? History is also littered with largely abandoned things like Prolog (which mostly survives in Erlang), Datalog, hierarchical databases, object databases, etc., some of which were experimental, others which were failed attempts at creating a shiny new thing. I suspect that while much of the abandoned tech would be hard/pointless to revive, there are ideas to learn from them. Then there are technologies that are keeping people and companies productive and successful, but since there's no hype surrounding them, and productive people prefer staying productive, the grapevine
Why it failed: ...Or you wish that we'd bring back or learn from more? There's a lot out there. Occasionally I bump into systems, languages, techniques, etc. that I haven't heard of, and which don't seem to be popular, for whatever reason. For example, how many people use Cl
atombender
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: Mozilla Persona Post-Mortem
As far as I can tell, the demise of Mozilla Persona has left a vacuum in terms of user-controlled identity solutions. Why did Persona fail? What else is happening in this area? What's coming up on the horizon?
Why it failed: As far as I can tell, the demise of Mozilla Persona has left a vacuum in terms of user-controlled identity solutions. Why did Persona fail? What else is happening in this area? What's coming up on the horizon?
pc2g4d
- startupShut down2018
Internet Archive Announces Lead Eng. Role for Archive.org
Dream role? Preserve & Empower digital freedom. The Internet Archive just announced a lead tech position for their main Archive.org website. Be one of five engineers behind one of the world's top 260 websites. ## Champion "Universal Access to All Knowledge": - Non-profit w/ engineering salary (what?!) - Great power, great responsibility (3.5M uniques/day) - Help millions internationally access books, open access papers, and more - Work in SF, near golden gate park, in massive temple of public knowledge (remote possible!) - Free Friday lunches & frequent civic-natured events, e.g. decentralizedweb.net - php, js, react, less; front-end, accessibility, design systems ## At a glance Have enormous impact, ship code used by millions, help grow a community of contributors, be a key stakeholder in the design & direction of archive.org, work with a small team
Why it failed: Dream role? Preserve & Empower digital freedom. The Internet Archive just announced a lead tech position for their main Archive.org website. Be one of five engineers behind one of the world's top 260 websites. ## Champion "Universal Access to All Knowledge": -
mekarpeles
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: How have you handled existential crisis in your life?
From time to time, more often than I would like, I have a full blown existential crisis. It can be triggered by something as simple as a YouTube video, suggested to me by YouTube, that is a cancer patient talking about their final days. That's what it was today. Given we're (largely) engineers and science minded folks here, I ask HN: How do you handle deep existential questions? More specifically, here are some questions I really struggle with: - How do you deal with the fact that we don't know why anything at all exists? Why, for instance, do atoms, subatomic particles, etc, exist AT ALL? Why not NOTHING? - How do you deal with the fact that your life is meaningless. You will die and - at best - leave behind a legacy for history books. More likely, you will die and it will be completely insignificant. To put it another way: How do you deal with the fact that your life is
Why it failed: From time to time, more often than I would like, I have a full blown existential crisis. It can be triggered by something as simple as a YouTube video, suggested to me by YouTube, that is a cancer patient talking about their final days. That's what it was today. Given we
erigin
- startupShut down2018
Show IH: A 7 day livestream on Twitch of me building a startup, fully open
Hey folks! Long time listener, first-time caller. For the last month or so I've been meaning to start yet another project of building a scrappy startup and seeing where it takes me. About two weeks ago, I came across Pieter Level's concept of 'open' metrics and got inspired. Yesterday, I went live for Day 1 with a Twitch & YouTube stream to share every step of my journey over the next 7 days of building and launching my project, an eCommerce service business for providing professional & short 'store reviews'. In fact, I'll be live when this post goes up > https://www.twitch.tv/thecoppinger/ Thanks to feedback from folks on Reddit and Indie Hackers, I've created a 'Day 1' recap video which can be viewed here (I'll be doing one each morning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpOT1B6rpXc&
Why it failed: Hey folks! Long time listener, first-time caller. For the last month or so I've been meaning to start yet another project of building a scrappy startup and seeing where it takes me. About two weeks ago, I came across Pieter Level's concept of 'open' metrics an
thecoppinger
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: Help (no life thread)
Hello all, I made this burner acc on HN to try and ask people without showing exactly who I am. So in short, I am going down the hill, I am starting to loose interest in almost anything but sitting and staring at the wall. Now I am in this state in which nothing really interests me, I do not cook anymore, I do not go to the gym, hell if I leave my flat.. What is wrong with me? I am a 26 year old, have been working in web dev since 19 trying to make a startup for the past 2-3 years, but I fail to see any progress. I just do not know how this life thing works! I have ambitions, I do not want to remain in a 40-60k job (this is Europe) for the rest of my life, but through my work experience I was always seen as the young one and given no choice but to quit and get a new job in order to advance a bit further. On the other side, I have made 3-4 projects, first solo and then with other people a
Why it failed: Hello all, I made this burner acc on HN to try and ask people without showing exactly who I am. So in short, I am going down the hill, I am starting to loose interest in almost anything but sitting and staring at the wall. Now I am in this state in which nothing really interests
burnerAddress
- startupShut down2018
Launch HN: Numericcal (YC.S18) – Lifecycle Management for ML Models on the Edge
Hey HN, We’re Ranko and Shaoyi, co-founders of Numericcal ( https://numericcal.com ). We’re building developer tools to simplify building, optimizing and maintaining Machine Learning models for embedded, mobile and IoT applications. This platform is the result of our own struggles while helping on two ML powered projects; one using Computer Vision and one Voice Recognition. In both cases running models in the cloud was too expensive and slow for a good user experience. Moreover, it was not clear whether the training data our Data Science team had, at the beginning of the project, was representative of the data to be encountered in production. The solution for cost and speed was to run inference on some end-device. However, we did not know which device would be feasible, nor did we know what model the Data Science team would end up with. We initially considered two options: * Po
Why it failed: Hey HN, We’re Ranko and Shaoyi, co-founders of Numericcal ( https://numericcal.com ). We’re building developer tools to simplify building, optimizing and maintaining Machine Learning models for embedded, mobile and IoT applications. This platform is the result of our ow
radoye
- startupShut down2018
Launch HN: Deepgram (YC W16) – Scalable Speech API for Businesses
Hey HN, I’m Scott Stephenson, one of the cofounders of Deepgram ( https://www.deepgram.com/ ). Getting information from recorded phone calls and meetings is time-intensive, costly, and imprecise. Our speech recognition API allows businesses to reliably translate high-value unstructured audio into accurate, parsable data. Deepgram started when my cofounder Noah Shutty and I had just finished looking for dark matter (while in a particle physics lab at University of Michigan). Noah had the idea to start recording all audio from his life, 24/7. After gathering hundreds of hours of recordings, we wanted to search inside this fresh dataset, but realized there wasn’t a good way to find specific moments. So, we built a tool utilizing the same AI techniques we used for finding dark matter particle events, and it ended up working pretty well. A few months later, we made a singl
Why it failed: Hey HN, I’m Scott Stephenson, one of the cofounders of Deepgram ( https://www.deepgram.com/ ). Getting information from recorded phone calls and meetings is time-intensive, costly, and imprecise. Our speech recognition API allows businesses to reliably translate hi
stephensonsco
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: What do you look for in a software engineering candidate?
Hi HN, I am at my wits end trying to find a job and considering giving up. I graduated 11 months ago from a leading university, an active contributor and open source maintainer on Github (with libraries of my own) and have written apps that is live on the App Store. Been doing over 20 algorithm challenges a day (10 on leetcode, 10 on HackerRank) and I still keep getting no response or an immediate rejection from companies big and small. Went through one company which lead me on with first a phone interview then a hacker rank challenge then a take home project then a onsite interview with a whiteboard programming challenge and a final interview. I never heard back from them, only to find out later on that I had been rejected without them telling me! For me this has happened so many times that this was the last straw for me after 30+ interviews from several companies I applied for. It'
Why it failed: Hi HN, I am at my wits end trying to find a job and considering giving up. I graduated 11 months ago from a leading university, an active contributor and open source maintainer on Github (with libraries of my own) and have written apps that is live on the App Store. Been doing ov
trycatcthrowawy
- startupShut down2018
Launch HN: Promise (YC W18) – Cost-effective, more humane alternative to jail
Hi HN, We are Phaedra and Diana of Promise ( http://joinpromise.com/ ). We provide a cost-effective, more humane alternative to incarceration. We work for government agencies to monitor and support individuals who would otherwise be in jail or who are under some form of community supervision. There are almost 2.3 million people behind bars in the US and another 4.5+ million people on probation or parole. Almost 450,000 people are in jails pretrial, meaning they have not been convicted of the crime for which they were arrested. The majority of these individuals remain in custody because they cannot afford to pay for their release. This is costly for governments and devastating for the individuals who remain in jail who can lose their job, housing, children and more while incarcerated. Believe it or not, many of these people never even end up being charged with or convicted
Why it failed: Hi HN, We are Phaedra and Diana of Promise ( http://joinpromise.com/ ). We provide a cost-effective, more humane alternative to incarceration. We work for government agencies to monitor and support individuals who would otherwise be in jail or who are under some fo
dfrappier
- startupShut down2018
Launch HN: EnvKey (YC W18) – Smart Configuration and Secrets Management
Hi HN! I’m Dane, the founder of EnvKey ( https://www.envkey.com ). EnvKey is an end-to-end encrypted 1Password-like service that lets dev teams manage API keys, credentials, and configuration easily and securely. For some background, you can check out https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/envkey-wants-to-create-a-s... as well as a Show HN from when EnvKey first launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15330757 . The Show HN is what got EnvKey its first batch of production users, and I probably wouldn’t have gotten into YC without it. So thanks HN! I owe a hell of a lot to this community. On where the idea came from: I had the first inklings at my last job. We were in the MVP stage, so we ended up with a bunch of separate apps and services as we experimented. These were split between CloudFoundry and Heroku, and we also had an in-ho
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Dane, the founder of EnvKey ( https://www.envkey.com ). EnvKey is an end-to-end encrypted 1Password-like service that lets dev teams manage API keys, credentials, and configuration easily and securely. For some background, you can check out https://
danenania
- startupShut down2018
Ask HN: Getting over interview anxiety?
Hi HN! So recently I applied for a software engineering role at a startup. A week and a bit ago I had an interview where they and I chatted for a bit and got to know each other a little, which I thought went swimmingly. Yesterday however, was my technical screen. I was confident but nervous beforehand, but when it started that's when my mind froze, I couldn't think at all and I was just a bumbling mess. It was by no means a difficult problem and almost immediately afterwards and when the pressure was gone the solution became obvious to me, but by then I knew it was too late to change anything. Stuff like this happens to me all the time. Not every time I'm being judged in person, but every time I'm being judged where I need to think and I _need_ to succeed and I'm not in a position of power. I just get so much anxiety and my mind completely shuts down. It has caus
Why it failed: Hi HN! So recently I applied for a software engineering role at a startup. A week and a bit ago I had an interview where they and I chatted for a bit and got to know each other a little, which I thought went swimmingly. Yesterday however, was my technical screen. I was confident
JessicaTG