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.
1,900 solutions
- 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: 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
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: 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: 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
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: 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: I hated how much my 12-year-old played Roblox, so we built our own FPS
I'm a father of two, 7 and 12. They are obsessed with Roblox, especially Rivals. Like a lot of parents, we did not love it. We tried the usual things: block it, limit it, set timers." It became a daily battle, a lose-lose situation. So I flipped the problem. Instead of fighting what they loved, I decided to lean into it, but with a twist. Why just play an FPS when you could build one together? My kids became the PMs. Claude and I became their engineer. I was shocked by how fast we moved. We picked a name, Cooked and started building. Get in. Lock in. Get cooked! In the first 3 hours, we had an actual FPS we could play together in the browser. Next day I invited my friend's two kids over. Suddenly, I had four PMs. We had 3 laptops, 1 iPad and 1 iPhone. So in 30mins we added mobile support and could play all 5 together. The kids would ask for features: "Can we have a ro
Why it failed: I'm a father of two, 7 and 12. They are obsessed with Roblox, especially Rivals. Like a lot of parents, we did not love it. We tried the usual things: block it, limit it, set timers." It became a daily battle, a lose-lose situation. So I flipped the problem. Instead of
davitb
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: I built a task system to handle the drudgery so I could focus on tasks
I'm a software engineer from the east coast (who has lived in Boston, NY, the bay area, UK, France), and I built a task system called 3 & Done. It's the place you trust to store everything you need to do. It accepts voice input for rapid entry, as well as text (it stores the audio locally so you can listen to jog your memory) and emails you every morning with the three most important things for you to do that day, and why, based on what you've said about the task: deadlines, urgency, sitting too long. I've been at software engineering for about 44 years now... Grew up with it, which was unusual when I started, and I was always good about getting into the zone and doing things. The career started small, small company, then back office, the dot com startups, then smaller companies again after the bust, a non-profit, and eventually YouTube (Google at the time, but ju
Why it failed: I'm a software engineer from the east coast (who has lived in Boston, NY, the bay area, UK, France), and I built a task system called 3 & Done. It's the place you trust to store everything you need to do. It accepts voice input for rapid entry, as well as text (it s
dmayle
- 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
- 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
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
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
Same as the popular question from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951 I'm asking again as a lot has changed in the past few years especially w.r.t LLMs, coding agents etc. copy pasting from the op: "I'm an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible." - I really don't care about the product I work on. I just want to do some task/project and checkout. - Fully remote will be ideal. - Salary can be on the low end. - I feel the world currently is too hyper-capitalistic and I don't think I fit in well. On top of that my country has a billion+ people and everything seems like battle for scraps. Unless I hit home with some indie hacking/side project, I don't think this will be possible. I believe there must some niche apps/plugin/extension/ssydev roles for some crm/cms e
Why it failed: Same as the popular question from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951 I'm asking again as a lot has changed in the past few years especially w.r.t LLMs, coding agents etc. copy pasting from the op: "I'm an average developer looking fo
makemethrowaway
- startupShut down2026
Durable Object alarm loop: $34k in 8 days, zero users, no platform warning
Sharing this as a warning to anyone using Cloudflare Durable Objects with alarms. Root cause: My DO agent's onStart() handler called this.ctx.storage.setAlarm() on every wake-up without checking whether an alarm was already scheduled. Combined with 60+ preview Worker deployments each creating independent DO instances, this created a runaway self-health-check loop. Timeline: - April 3: loop began (zero DO usage before this date) - April 4-5: peaked at ~930 billion row reads/day - April 11: found it, fixed it - April 15: $34,895 invoice due with no billing response yet The fix: // Before (dangerous) async onStart() { await this.ctx.storage.setAlarm(Date.now() + 60_000) } // After (safe) async onStart() { const existing = await this.ctx.storage.getAlarm() if (!existing) { await this.ctx.storage.setAlarm(Date.now() + 60_000) } } Other things worth doing: - Strip
Why it failed: Sharing this as a warning to anyone using Cloudflare Durable Objects with alarms. Root cause: My DO agent's onStart() handler called this.ctx.storage.setAlarm() on every wake-up without checking whether an alarm was already scheduled. Combined with 60+ preview Worker deploym
thewillmoss
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How to break Claude Code addiction?
TL;DR: How can I break my workaholic Claude Code addiction? Hello HN users, I really appreciate you reading this. I can't think of a better audience for this question. If this issue has affected you in any way, I would be really thankful to you if you could leave a comment on this post. MY GOAL: to be able to consistently do an acceptable day's work as a professional software engineer, keeping a reasonably good understanding of the parts of the code that I changed that day, ending the day roughly on time, feeling like I did enough, feeling like I can forget about work until the next workday. MY PROBLEM: I find that as the workday goes on and time runs out, my style of programming gets further from LLM-assisted coding (me designing and writing code, talking to Claude Code only when I get stuck) and closer to pure vibe-coding (where I don't even review the code it writes unt
Why it failed: TL;DR: How can I break my workaholic Claude Code addiction? Hello HN users, I really appreciate you reading this. I can't think of a better audience for this question. If this issue has affected you in any way, I would be really thankful to you if you could leave a comment o
isomorph
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How do you deal with AI output of your boss?
So, my boss goes on a rampage. You can clearly see the joy and at the same time the rage and impatience. AI is the tool he always wanted. We are too slow. Process is out of the window. No need for sprints anymore. No planning, just doing. All people downstream must somehow adapt. Whenever i see now his automated messages in slack, my natural reaction is: why do i even bother reading that? Thats for machines to read. He does not need me? Clearly i am not made for that. What is he expecting me to do? To confirm how great the AI did the job? Should i remember all these perfect presentations AI has created and integrate it into my doings into the coming weeks? I am torn. Should i really free my AI and deal with all this incoming text? Is this the way to react on this perfection? I am not mad at him, it clearly frees him of all the burder of dealing with people. I just dont know how to deal w
Why it failed: So, my boss goes on a rampage. You can clearly see the joy and at the same time the rage and impatience. AI is the tool he always wanted. We are too slow. Process is out of the window. No need for sprints anymore. No planning, just doing. All people downstream must somehow adapt.
okr
- startupShut down2026
LG ThinQ Terms of Use
Some of my kitchen appliances are LG and I installed the LG ThinQ app on my phone. Sometimes I like to leave a cold dish in the oven before I go out then remotely start it when I’m on my way back home, so I arrive to a nice hot dinner. After a recent HN post about LG malware and further research, I decided to kick my appliances out of the network. I also tried to remove my user account just to find out that in order to use the app I need to first accept the new terms of use. I asked ChatGPT for a summary. This seems a lot more aggressive than the standard terms of use of other products and services. 1. No arbitration opt-out. You give up court, jury trial, class actions, mass actions, and collective claims. Most disputes must go through individual arbitration, and LG says your only alternative is to stop using the service. Claims generally must be brought within one year. (Sections 20.b
Why it failed: Some of my kitchen appliances are LG and I installed the LG ThinQ app on my phone. Sometimes I like to leave a cold dish in the oven before I go out then remotely start it when I’m on my way back home, so I arrive to a nice hot dinner. After a recent HN post about LG malware and
tedggh
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?
With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc. Also with individuals spending less and less time on any one problem, finding an expert to answer questions has become challenging. People don't have that single domain of expertise like we used to. There's too much surface area to cover. Are we the only ones dealing with this? How's everyone else handling it?
Why it failed: With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc. Also with individuals spending less and less time on any one problem, finding an expert to answer questions has become challenging. People don't
kadhirvelm
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Netfence – Like Envoy for eBPF Filters
To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter to allow traffic. By doing it this way, we can still allow DNS-defined rules, but prevent contacting random IPs. There's also no network performance penalty, since it's just DNS lookups and eBPF filters referencing memory. It also means you don't have to tamper with the base image, which the agent could potentially manipulate to remove rules (unless you prevent root maybe). It automatically manages the lifecycle of eBPF filters on cgroups and interfaces, so it works well for both containers and micro VMs (like Firecracker). You implement a control plane, just like Envoy xDS, which you can manage t
Why it failed: To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter
dangoodmanUT
- startupShut down2026
Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y
The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard That's a huge drop. And, it matches my "human" observations. A lot of products are being vibe coded, released, and soon after that abandoned. It's become too cheap to produce software. So, a lot of people have been experimenting for 'free' with their ideas - only to find out that they weren't viable... or that they couldn't bring customers in. Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free. Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening produc
Why it failed: The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://
stanislavb
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please? (2026)
The 2020 thread does a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It shows 100 solutions in light of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Intense opinions and discussion. It teaches about alligator energy and how they can live without food for up to two years. It teaches that this site should look like top, yet I’ve rarely seen top on a white terminal in the past two decades. This does exist, nofi. Workarounds exist, and those are “mid” janky shit shows. One I tried was an iOS app. It flashes the page between light and dark on every click. Aside from not being a solution, it’s nausea-inducing, takes 20+ steps to install, requires you to blindly trust the app without a Git repo, and requires you to change your OS. It shows that running 20 miles to solve this is what people do to get to any promise of a solution. So many of these exist that it’s just a swamp of well intend
Why it failed: The 2020 thread does a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It shows 100 solutions in light of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Intense opinions and discussion. It teaches about alligator energy and how they can live without food for up to two years. It
Stitch4223
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How I find a job where what is needed is solid code, not firefighting?
Today I saw that post about AI destroying the future of West software. I remembered I am having a similar struggle with my jobs. Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same quality in 2 months. Then they realize they are late actually (one company for example was 6 months late to deliver to clients) and want me to use AI to churn out code even faster. Meanwhile I find out they lost all people that knew how things actually worked, there is no documentation, or worse, the documentation is outright wrong ( one project I worked had thousands of Jira tickets generated from a requisites document. After some months of politicking I got permission to see the requisites document and learned it was from another project entirely, they wasted years coding with the wrong requisites outright! ) Then as
Why it failed: Today I saw that post about AI destroying the future of West software. I remembered I am having a similar struggle with my jobs. Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same qualit
speeder
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing. Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving. Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone): - Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third
Why it failed: The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd do
ok_orco
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: A new benchmark for testing LLMs for deterministic outputs
When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucinated values like `invoice_date` being off by 2 months or the transcript array ordered wrongly. The JSON is valid, but the values are not. Structured output today is a big part of using LLMs, especially when building deterministic workflows. Current structured output benchmarks (e.g., JSONSchemaBench) only validate the pass rate for JSON schema and types, and not the actual values within the produced JSON. So we designed the Structured Output Benchmark (SOB) that fixes this by measuring both the JSON schema pass rate, types, and the value accuracy across all three modalities, text, image, and audio. For our test s
Why it failed: When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucin
khurdula