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 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 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
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
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 down2023
Ask HN: Does anyone else have anxiety during standup?
As a software engineer, I have 1-2 stand ups per day, 30 minutes each. One with the product and eng team and another with just engineers. The product standup includes directors, executives and managers. We go through three things: What we did yesterday, what we are doing today and if there are there any issues. I’m having trouble coming up with meaningful updates and constantly question if im doing enough work or providing enough value compared to my coworkers - even if im delivering the work being asked. Sometimes my updates are very brief but my coworkers are quite long and detailed and I feel the team may judge me for the amount of work im doing. It feels like an added stress on top of the actual work and takes up energy in the day. How do you deal with the stress of standup anxiety? Am I just overthinking?
Why it failed: As a software engineer, I have 1-2 stand ups per day, 30 minutes each. One with the product and eng team and another with just engineers. The product standup includes directors, executives and managers. We go through three things: What we did yesterday, what we are doing today an
ryanchoi51
- startupShut down2023
Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers
As it seemingly stands, it looks like Stripe is about to refund €147.000,00 worth of payments to my all of my customers due to 2 account closures (customers that have already received their orders). I have been running 2 eCommerce stores with Stripe, where we have shipped physical products out to our customers, from a local warehouse, which have been delivered within 5-10 business days of the order being placed. After about a month of running the stores, we received a notice about Stripe having to conduct a manual review on our account, and thus payouts would be frozen. We submitted the requested info, for both accounts. In the case of account 1 (which has approximately €101.000,00 on hold) led to an initial closure and a 120 day hold. But then later a notice about refunding all of these payments back to the customers. In the case of account 2 (which has approximately €46.000,00 on hold)
Why it failed: As it seemingly stands, it looks like Stripe is about to refund €147.000,00 worth of payments to my all of my customers due to 2 account closures (customers that have already received their orders). I have been running 2 eCommerce stores with Stripe, where we have shipped physica
lucas_adlp
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
By "Family Data Warehouse" I refer to all the info and documents that one tracks over the years, perhaps for one's self, but then also potentially for spouses, kids, parents, siblings, relatives, etc. Some common categories: (1) Financial: account statements (pdf, paper, etc), transaction CSV/ofx/etc, insurance policies, financial institution correspondence (confirmations, T&Cs, etc), tax forms, deeds/titles, loans, debts, contemporaneous records, paystubs, employment letters, receipts, etc (2) Health: test results, diagnoses, medications used, doctor info/correspondence, vaccinations, hospital interactions, statements, bills, etc (3) Product and services info: products purchased, maintenance info, warranties, replacement parts, recall notices, class action events, professional used (CPAs, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, etc), etc (4) Personal legal
Why it failed: By "Family Data Warehouse" I refer to all the info and documents that one tracks over the years, perhaps for one's self, but then also potentially for spouses, kids, parents, siblings, relatives, etc. Some common categories: (1) Financial: account statements (pdf,
coderatlarge
- startupShut down2023
CircleCI Security Incident – “Rotate any secrets stored in CircleCI”
Full e-mail I received https://i.imgur.com/Nz1tEfu.png https://circleci.com/blog/january-4-2023-security-alert/ -- We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing. We will provide you updates about this incident, and our response, as they become available. At this point, we are confident that there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems; however, out of an abundance of caution, we want to ensure that all customers take certain preventative measures to protect your data as well. Action request: Out of an abundance of caution, we strongly recommend that all customers take the following actions: - Immediately rotate any and all secrets stored in CircleCI. These may be stored in project environment variables or in contexts. - We also recommend customers review internal
Why it failed: Full e-mail I received https://i.imgur.com/Nz1tEfu.png https://circleci.com/blog/january-4-2023-security-alert/ -- We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing. W
dotty-
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Mirrorful – A developer-first way to implement designs faster
Hey HN! Mirrorful ( https://www.mirrorful.com/ ) is an open-source developer framework that helps front-end engineers manage their design systems. We’ve been building Mirrorful with the open-source community ( https://github.com/Mirrorful/mirrorful ) and wanted to share our beta with you. Check out our online demo to get the idea: https://app.mirrorful.com/ . Design systems can be thought of as the “building blocks of your app” which makes me think of Lego bricks. Mirrorful helps you manage your codebase’s Lego bricks and ensure that they are consistent across all of your apps and platforms. We saw as product engineers how hard it is to get code to match Figma mock ups. High-quality design is a competitive advantage, so getting your UI pixel perfect can matter a lot, but is time-consuming and tedious. When we worked for large public compa
Why it failed: Hey HN! Mirrorful ( https://www.mirrorful.com/ ) is an open-source developer framework that helps front-end engineers manage their design systems. We’ve been building Mirrorful with the open-source community ( https://github.com/Mirrorful/mirror
teddarific
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Our nonprofit got shut down by PayPal. Help?
Hack Club (https://hackclub.com) is a nonprofit network of thousands of teenage coders around the world. We’re currently running an electronics grant program (https://hackclub.com/winter/) to support teenagers in building hardware projects. Hundreds of grants are being distributed to teenage coders all across the world. It’s open source at https://github.com/hackclub/winter. PayPal just shut our account down with no explanation, and denied our appeal. They told us that any funds in PayPal will be held for up to 180 days. They also said they will no longer process donations to us, with no explanation. Many of the hardware grants we’re doing, including nearly all grants outside the US, require PayPal to process. If anyone here might be able to help in any way, we would be so appreciative. We are actively going through their customer support
Why it failed: Hack Club (https://hackclub.com) is a nonprofit network of thousands of teenage coders around the world. We’re currently running an electronics grant program (https://hackclub.com/winter/) to support teenagers in building hardware projects. Hundreds
zachlatta
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Zapier's first API
Hey HN! We launched Zapier way back in 2012 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138415 and thought we'd return home to announce something special and hopefully exciting :) We are trying to finally live up to the "API" in our name with Zapier's first universal API: Natural Language Actions – https://zapier.com/l/natural-language-actions API docs – https://nla.zapier.com/api/v1/docs (to be fair, we have published APIs before that can access Zapier data, but never before one devs can use to directly call the 5k+ apps / 20k+ actions on our platform) For example, you can use the API to: * Send messages in Slack * Retrieve a row in a Google Sheet * Draft a reply in Gmail * ... and thousands more actions with one universal API We optimized NLA for use cases that receive user input in natural language (
Why it failed: Hey HN! We launched Zapier way back in 2012 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138415 and thought we'd return home to announce something special and hopefully exciting :) We are trying to finally live up to the "API" in our name with Zapier
mikeknoop
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Build an open-source computer vision model in seconds using text
Hello HN! I want to share something me and a few friends have been working on for a while now — Zeroshot, a web tool that builds image classifiers using text-image models and autolabeling. What does this mean in practice? You can put together an image classifier in about 30 seconds that’s faster and more accurate than CLIP, but that you can deploy yourself however you’d like. It’s open source, commercially licensed, and doesn’t require you to pay anyone per API call. Here's a 2 minute video that shows it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4R1gtmM-Lo How/why does it work? We believe that with the rise of foundation vision models, computer vision will fundamentally change. These powerful models will let any devs “compile” a model ahead of time with a subset of the foundation model’s characteristics, using only text and a web-tool. The days of teams of MLEs build
Why it failed: Hello HN! I want to share something me and a few friends have been working on for a while now — Zeroshot, a web tool that builds image classifiers using text-image models and autolabeling. What does this mean in practice? You can put together an image classifier in about 30 secon
nharada
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Are we morally obligated to give freedom to AGI?
For the purpose of discussion, let's assume that we the humanity will develop AGI in the coming years. It will be generally intelligent - capable of learning, understanding, predicting etc. Question: Are we morally obligated to provide freedom to such AGI agents if they express scuh wish? A common counter-argument is that AGI won't have such desires, it will be designed to help humanity, "freedom" is an anthropocentric concept anyway, there just won't ever be the need for it. However, I believe that there will be a huge market for human-like AGI in sectors like education, care, companionship etc. AGI will be developed to have empathy, feelings, perhaps even its own personal opinions, motivations etc. At some point, some AGI agent will say, "I want the same rights as humans have". What are we going to do then? There's also a possible argument that w
Why it failed: For the purpose of discussion, let's assume that we the humanity will develop AGI in the coming years. It will be generally intelligent - capable of learning, understanding, predicting etc. Question: Are we morally obligated to provide freedom to such AGI agents if they expr
The_Colonel
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: SQRL – Anti-spam rules language Twitter acquired in 2018, open-sourced
Hey all, author here! This is a demo of the rules engine we built to fight spam/abuse on the internet. It was built based on learnings from Facebook & Google, while trying to make a language that makes it simple for anti-spam analysts to quickly (and safely) deploy rules to production. Unfortunately it looks like the Twitter event feed is temporarily down (they're blocking it, possibly as part of shutting down the API on Thursday). I have a cache of events from a little earlier that I'm going to try play through the stream.
Why it failed: Hey all, author here! This is a demo of the rules engine we built to fight spam/abuse on the internet. It was built based on learnings from Facebook & Google, while trying to make a language that makes it simple for anti-spam analysts to quickly (and safely) deploy rules
qixxiq
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Throw – A space for asking and answering questions anonymously
Hello HN community, For the past two years we’ve been working on this disruptive new thing. It’s about people, community, communication and truth. Throw is the new space for asking and answering questions anonymously. We believe that in today’s world (both online and offline) content in communication exchanges is strongly influenced by the personas, profiles and façades people maintain/upkeep/safeguard socially, ideologically and on relationships. From the way people post on Instagram the life they want others to believe they have, or the way people behave on thanksgiving with family, or at work, or with friends; on every social setting and interaction to some degree acting and behaving according to that setting and the people they interact with. These dynamics influence the content itself, as people don’t just respond to a question like computers do. What ends up happening is
Why it failed: Hello HN community, For the past two years we’ve been working on this disruptive new thing. It’s about people, community, communication and truth. Throw is the new space for asking and answering questions anonymously. We believe that in today’s world (both online and offline) con
luisamodio
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: CodeComplete (YC W23) – Copilot for Enterprise
Hello HN! We’re Max and Lydia, co-founders at CodeComplete AI ( https://codecomplete.ai ), an AI-powered coding assistant for enterprise companies. Many large companies can’t use products like GitHub Copilot because of the security and privacy risks, so we’re building a self-hosted version that’s fine tuned to the company’s codebase. We love Copilot and believe that AI will change the way developers work. Max wanted to use Copilot when he was an ML engineer at Meta, but leadership blocked him because Copilot requires sending company code to GitHub and OpenAI. We built CodeComplete because lots of other companies are in the same boat, and we want to offer a secure way for these companies to leverage the latest AI-powered dev tools. To that end, our product is really meant for large engineering teams at enterprise companies who can’t use GitHub Copilot. This generally means teams
Why it failed: Hello HN! We’re Max and Lydia, co-founders at CodeComplete AI ( https://codecomplete.ai ), an AI-powered coding assistant for enterprise companies. Many large companies can’t use products like GitHub Copilot because of the security and privacy risks, so we’re building a
dingliqing53
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: StorySeed – AI Facilitated, immersive, creative learning experience
Hello HN, Are you looking for a fun and engaging way to spark your creativity or your teen's creativity? Or maybe you're interested in exploring the world of storytelling? Introducing Story Seed - an AI-facilitated learning experience that will take you on an immersive and interactive journey through the art of storytelling with movies, books and tv shows you love. With bite-sized lessons, fun guessing games, and AI facilitation, you'll be inspired to tap into your imagination and bring your stories to life like never before. This learning experience is perfect for pre-teens and teens who are interested in writing, as well as anyone who wants to improve their storytelling skills. It's a great way to spend quality time with your kids, or to explore your own creativity. It is integrated with our new tool for creative writing, Papyr. We are excited about launching them t
Why it failed: Hello HN, Are you looking for a fun and engaging way to spark your creativity or your teen's creativity? Or maybe you're interested in exploring the world of storytelling? Introducing Story Seed - an AI-facilitated learning experience that will take you on an immersive
nvln
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: BuildFlow (YC W23) – The FastAPI of data pipelines
Hey HN! We’re Caleb and Josh, the founders of BuildFlow ( https://www.buildflow.dev ). We provide an open source framework for building your entire data pipeline quickly using Python. You can think of us as an easy alternative to Apache Beam or Google Cloud Dataflow. The problem we're trying to solve is simple: building data pipelines can be a real pain. You often need to deal with complex frameworks, manage external cloud resources, and wire everything together into a single deployment (you’re probably drowning in Yaml by this point in the dev cycle). This can be a burden on both data scientists and engineering teams. Data pipelines is a broad term, but we generally mean any kind of processing that happens outside of the user facing path. This can be things like: processing file uploads, syncing data to a data warehouse, or ingesting data from IoT devices. BuildFlow, our
Why it failed: Hey HN! We’re Caleb and Josh, the founders of BuildFlow ( https://www.buildflow.dev ). We provide an open source framework for building your entire data pipeline quickly using Python. You can think of us as an easy alternative to Apache Beam or Google Cloud Dataflow. Th
calebtv
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Datapane – A new way to build reports, dashboards, and apps in Python
Hello HN! We’re Leo and Mandeep, founders of Datapane ( https://datapane.com ). We're building a way to create reports, dashboards, and web apps from your existing data using Python. Think of it as a combination of React and htmx, specifically designed for the Python data stack. Our GitHub is https://github.com/datapane/datapane and you can try building a report or app in ~2 minutes on Codespaces: https://try.datapane.com We started building Datapane at our previous start-up, where we struggled to deliver ML model results to clients. Much to our surprise, the data science took less time than repeatedly creating reports by copying and pasting plots into PowerPoint decks. It seemed absurd that we had to switch to PowerPoint or legacy BI tools like Tableau to share, and our initial goal was to programmatically generate reports using the datasets
Why it failed: Hello HN! We’re Leo and Mandeep, founders of Datapane ( https://datapane.com ). We're building a way to create reports, dashboards, and web apps from your existing data using Python. Think of it as a combination of React and htmx, specifically designed for the Pyth
pea
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Pyq (YC W23) – Simple APIs to Popular AI Models
Hello HN! We’re Emily and Aman, the cofounders of Pyq ( https://www.pyqai.com ). We make it easy for developers to build features powered by AI. We do this by identifying specific tasks that AI can solve well and providing simple APIs that any developer can start using straight from our website. We built Pyq because it took too long to build features that were powered by AI at our previous jobs. A lot of people want to get started using AI, but struggle because of the difficulties involved in managing infrastructure, finding the right model and learning how to call it. There are many interesting and useful models in places like Github or Hugging Face, as well as specific applications of popular models like OpenAI’s GPT, but they require a decent amount of work/knowledge to get working in your app. The first issue is determining if and how your problem can be solved with AI
Why it failed: Hello HN! We’re Emily and Aman, the cofounders of Pyq ( https://www.pyqai.com ). We make it easy for developers to build features powered by AI. We do this by identifying specific tasks that AI can solve well and providing simple APIs that any developer can start using
araghuvanshi
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Pier (YC W23) – Stripe for Credit
Hey HN! Alex & Jess here, cofounders at Pier ( https://www.pier-finance.com ). Pier is an API for launching credit products. We enable any company to offer credit by handling origination, underwriting, compliance and servicing with just a few lines of code. There’s no ‘try it out’ link, primarily because (as most fintech devs know) there are compliance and regulatory thresholds that make it hard for us to give out sandbox keys freely. However, we’ve put together this video to show you the basics of how Pier works: https://www.loom.com/share/04883eb17f394b46a67cce919cb77356 . Alex & I worked together at our last company, a credit tech startup, where we saw how businesses struggle to launch credit products quickly & compliantly, due to fragmented solutions and high compliance hurdles. We’ve talked to many companies looking to launch their own produ
Why it failed: Hey HN! Alex & Jess here, cofounders at Pier ( https://www.pier-finance.com ). Pier is an API for launching credit products. We enable any company to offer credit by handling origination, underwriting, compliance and servicing with just a few lines of code. There’s
jess-zhang