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.
2,200 solutions
- startupShut down2024
Ask HN: How to deploy money effectively to save time and build a business?
Starting a company is a lot of work and requires focus on things that are most important for pushing the business forward. It can be easy to waste time on things that can be done as effectively by other people. * What types of activities, both business and personal, have you found to be effective to pay others to do? * How do you choose what tasks to do yourself and what to delegate? * How do you navigate getting high quality help versus saving money? * How do you find people you can trust? * How much do you value your time (e.g. I'll spend $20 to save an hour of my time)? A few examples: On the business side: * Taking slides and making them look professional, making a website, etc * Finances, taxes * Filtering through emails, and doing initial outreach to candidates Personal: * Cooking, cleaning, laundry * Shopping * Home repairs, car repair, etc For instance on home repairs, I
Why it failed: Starting a company is a lot of work and requires focus on things that are most important for pushing the business forward. It can be easy to waste time on things that can be done as effectively by other people. * What types of activities, both business and personal, have you foun
aga_ml
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: 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 down2023
Ask HN: Is there a post mortem for the UK flight control failure on 28th Aug?
All that I've seen so far is that is was a dodgy flight plan. Does anybody know any more?
Why it failed: All that I've seen so far is that is was a dodgy flight plan. Does anybody know any more?
rexfuzzle
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Why isn't bookmarking scroll position a thing?
A regular problem I have with the web is that I will find an interesting article and start reading only to later see how tiny the scroll bar is on the page and realise I don't have the time to finish in that moment. Now it seems like my only option is to bookmark the entire page and later scroll up and down trying to find my spot. This seems odd considering how ubiquitous the concept of bookmarks has been for centuries. It is common to be able to store locations in modern formats like video and music and be prompted whether to restore location or restart but not older formats like text. Bulletin boards often track the last page you visited but not which comments you've scrolled past. Although this is different to reading a single large body of text. It's made even worse by the fact that most pages load many trackers, some of which even track user scrolling, but that this i
Why it failed: A regular problem I have with the web is that I will find an interesting article and start reading only to later see how tiny the scroll bar is on the page and realise I don't have the time to finish in that moment. Now it seems like my only option is to bookmark the entire
12907835202
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Where are all the parties?
10 years ago, there were a lot of parties in my life, and now there are none. Where have they gone? Have you seen the same, and have you managed to revive your party life? I remember parties at friends places, for housewarmings, birthdays, holidays, sports games, barbecuing, karaoke, whatever. I remember parties at work, for people joining the team, for people leaving, for projects kicking off or finishing. Now my kids are older and it seems that only they get to party. I try my best, invited some people for parties, but we never seem to get invites in return. Hypotheses I have so far: - I'm just getting old (closing in on 50) and people my age don't party anymore - COVID happened and we still haven't restarted partying the way we used to - I'm just unlucky with my set of friends and need to renew my friendships Very interested in both macro trends (eg is partying ove
Why it failed: 10 years ago, there were a lot of parties in my life, and now there are none. Where have they gone? Have you seen the same, and have you managed to revive your party life? I remember parties at friends places, for housewarmings, birthdays, holidays, sports games, barbecuing, kara
throwaway_party
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Replbuilder, quickly build a Python REPL CLI prompt
`pip install replbuilder` Making a small tool for easier repl building, no more manual argument parsing. Perfect for creating ops tools and other context heavy cli operations.
Why it failed: `pip install replbuilder` Making a small tool for easier repl building, no more manual argument parsing. Perfect for creating ops tools and other context heavy cli operations.
Aperocky
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: What is new in algorithms and data structures these days?
Algs/DS were my first love in CS. Nowadays, all we hear about is AI/ML. There must be hardware/software improvements coming from or necessitating fundamental Algs/DS research. Care to share any of the favorite recent results? Are there big fields still making gains behind all this computing surge?
Why it failed: Algs/DS were my first love in CS. Nowadays, all we hear about is AI/ML. There must be hardware/software improvements coming from or necessitating fundamental Algs/DS research. Care to share any of the favorite recent results? Are there big fields still making
jvanderbot
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: An Immersive Game of Thrones Multiverse Experience
Alpha Version Demo: https://got.ready2play.online/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThronesMultiV/status/1697440568874348953 We're here to present an experimental product empowered by the blend of Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT! Dive into Westeros like never before. Our experimental product offers an immersive storytelling experience where you play a pivotal role in shaping the narrative. Ever wondered if the ending of the final seasons of Game of Thrones could've been different? Now's your chance to twist the tale. Current Features : - AI-driven alternative endings starting from the end of S7. - Real-time story interventions, allowing you to change the plotline as you read. What's Next : - Continuous enhancements to refine and polish the storytelling experience. - And yes, we're contemplating open-sourcing the project – giving b
Why it failed: Alpha Version Demo: https://got.ready2play.online/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThronesMultiV/status/1697440568874348953 We're here to present an experimental product empowered by the blend of Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT! Dive into We
thronesMultiV
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary
Actually, it is yet another tool to learn a language through immersion (classic set of features, watch on youtube/netflix, read a website or book). It has a popup dictionary so you can click on a word and it will show the definition. Nothing new in that regard, except that it has been made with only Korean in mind and does not plan to extends to other languages. I was learning and still am learning Korean (now using my own tool to learn!). I initially made the tool for myself because none of the tools out there could correctly figure out what a word was in the text. And that's where the biggest challenge was: recognizing the lemma. A lemma is the dictionary form of a word. An example in English would be "break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking" all becoming "break". In Korean a word cannot always accurately be returned to the lemma; this might lead to seve
Why it failed: Actually, it is yet another tool to learn a language through immersion (classic set of features, watch on youtube/netflix, read a website or book). It has a popup dictionary so you can click on a word and it will show the definition. Nothing new in that regard, except that i
alaanor
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Was any Starfighter postmortem ever published?
About seven years ago, HN veterans 'elptacek, 'patio11 and 'tptacek launched an hiring startup called Starfighter. Their approach aimed to shift away from traditional interviews and instead employ a CTF/Microcorruption kind of test, inspired by 'tptacek experience at Matasano. Unfortunately, Starfighter eventually wound down. Was there ever any post-mortem written on Starfighter? If not, would 'elptacek, 'patio11 and 'tptacek be willing to provide any details?
Why it failed: About seven years ago, HN veterans 'elptacek, 'patio11 and 'tptacek launched an hiring startup called Starfighter. Their approach aimed to shift away from traditional interviews and instead employ a CTF/Microcorruption kind of test, inspired by 'tptacek e
xoranth
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: I desperately want a solo business
An ex coworker (we are/were SWEs at Google) quit his job at the beginning of the year and started a solo SaaS solving a small and interesting niche b2b problem with generative AI, and his revenues are already $500k YTD (mostly profits, his hosting and marketing expenses are minimal). I am close to him and he showed me his Stripe account. No cofounders, no investors. Just himself, by design. What an amazing dream, not having to deal with coworkers/managers/meetings/scrum/stand ups/reporting/RTO/etc. He spends his days doing programming, some customer support, self marketing on niche forums and subreddits, and thinking about the next idea. It is truly my ideal life. I have had these thoughts for years, and every time I suppress them thinking “the grass is always greener, you’re a highly paid FAANG engineer, shut up and milk it”, but they just keep co
Why it failed: An ex coworker (we are/were SWEs at Google) quit his job at the beginning of the year and started a solo SaaS solving a small and interesting niche b2b problem with generative AI, and his revenues are already $500k YTD (mostly profits, his hosting and marketing expenses are
deanmoriarty
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: We built swup+fragment-plugin to visually enhance classic websites
## TL;DR - Progressively enhance your classic website / MPA to a single page app. - Support for fragment visits, comparable to nested routes in React or Vue. - Keep your site crawlable and indexable without any of the overhead of SSR. - No tight coupling of back- and frontend. Use the CMS / Framework / SSG of your choice. - Strong focus on interoperability with DOM-altering JS tools (think Alpine.js, jQuery, ...). - Strong focus on accessibility, even for fragment visits. ## Long Version: Best of three worlds Hi, I'm Rasso Hilber. I have been a web designer and developer since around 2004. From the beginning of my career, I always had to make tradeoffs between 3 goals when building websites: 1. The websites I build should be visually impressive, original, and snappy. 2. The websites I build should be crawlable, accessible and standards compliant. 3. The websites I bui
Why it failed: ## TL;DR - Progressively enhance your classic website / MPA to a single page app. - Support for fragment visits, comparable to nested routes in React or Vue. - Keep your site crawlable and indexable without any of the overhead of SSR. - No tight coupling of back- and fronten
rasso
- 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
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
Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers
Do you receive unsolicited phone calls or SMS/text spam? I made a free public service site explaining how to find the telecom carrier that is responsible for the spammer's (real) phone number and report the abuse to them – so the carrier can terminate their service. It works, and it feels like magic. Background: Earlier this year, I wrote an HN comment[1] explaining how to find the telecom carrier responsible for a robocall or SMS spam campaign. Those steps aren't documented anywhere else, even though they're actually pretty easy. This info deserved to be much more visible, so now it is: https://reportphonespam.org/ As my site says, most reputable telecom carriers don't want unsolicited messages on their network or phone numbers. In order to disconnect their abusive customers, they need to hear about the abuse. That's where you come in. In a f
Why it failed: Do you receive unsolicited phone calls or SMS/text spam? I made a free public service site explaining how to find the telecom carrier that is responsible for the spammer's (real) phone number and report the abuse to them – so the carrier can terminate their service. It
troydavis
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: How did you find yourself on HN?
Hello! I've been here for a few months now. When I got my new laptop, I installed brave instead of chrome and typing "news" in the top automatically re-directs here. I didn't expect to end up spending so much time here. I am nowhere near a programmer in my day-to-day life. I am currently embarking on a study of topology with the assistance of a friend who does research in mathematical physics, but aside from that my interests lay in literary fields and I'm quite shocked to see that very frequently the interests of other users here oftentimes matches up with my own. But I am also aware that many users here are actually in "silicon valley" (or at least work full time as developers); though, looking at the CS majors I went to school with, I have to imagine you guys are a special sort.
Why it failed: Hello! I've been here for a few months now. When I got my new laptop, I installed brave instead of chrome and typing "news" in the top automatically re-directs here. I didn't expect to end up spending so much time here. I am nowhere near a programmer in my day
DiscourseFan
- 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
Tell HN: Google to shutdown Jamboard by Oct 1st, 2024
Dear Jamboard user, We’re writing to let you know that we will wind down the Jamboard app next year, and offer integrations with industry-leading third-party whiteboard tools FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro as alternatives for whiteboarding in Google Workspace. These popular tools have numerous advanced features that empower users to collaborate seamlessly together inside of Google Workspace. Starting October 1, 2024, you’ll no longer be able to create new or edit existing Jams on any platform, including the web, iOS, and Android. Between October 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024, the app will be placed in “view-only” mode, during which time you can continue to back up your Jam files.
Why it failed: Dear Jamboard user, We’re writing to let you know that we will wind down the Jamboard app next year, and offer integrations with industry-leading third-party whiteboard tools FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro as alternatives for whiteboarding in Google Workspace. These popular tools h
redbell
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Metal (YC W23) – Embeddings as a Service
Hey HN! We’re Taylor, James and Sergio – the founders of Metal ( https://www.getmetal.io/ ). You can think of Metal as embeddings as a service. We help developers use embeddings without needing to build out infrastructure, storage, or tooling. Here’s a 2-minute overview: https://www.loom.com/share/39fb6df7fd73469eaf20b37248ceed0f If you’re unfamiliar with embeddings, they are representations of real world data expressed as a vector, where the position of the vector can be compared to other vectors – thereby deriving meaning from the data. They can be used to create things like semantic search, recommender systems, clustering analysis, classification, and more. Working at companies like Datadog, Meta, and Spotify, we found it frustrating to build ML apps. Lack of tooling, infrastructure, and proper abstraction made working with ML tedious and slow. To ge
Why it failed: Hey HN! We’re Taylor, James and Sergio – the founders of Metal ( https://www.getmetal.io/ ). You can think of Metal as embeddings as a service. We help developers use embeddings without needing to build out infrastructure, storage, or tooling. Here’s a 2-minute ove
tlowe11
- 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: 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: 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