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.
2,500 solutions
- startupShut down2024
Ask HN: Getting old and boring – What can I do about it?
I'm 33 and I am becoming terminally boring. I am primarily interested in my family (married, kids 7 and 3) and doing well at work, but that is about it? Outside of reading I have no hobbies, I am not part of any groups, I don't have any ambitions outside of home & work, and I don't drink or play video games or watch very much TV/movies. When I meet new people, I realize I don't have much to say because nobody cares about my work or my family or my books (nor should they, necessarily). I have a great remote job which pays well without being too demanding. It doesn't sound like much, but after working, family time, chores, and some reading it feels like my day is already full. In fact, I usually end each day wishing I had spent more time being a better husband/father/home-owner/reader -- adding any hobbies would make these feelings worse. I
Why it failed: I'm 33 and I am becoming terminally boring. I am primarily interested in my family (married, kids 7 and 3) and doing well at work, but that is about it? Outside of reading I have no hobbies, I am not part of any groups, I don't have any ambitions outside of home & w
hn_burner_2038
- startupShut down2024
Ask HN: Best Tools for Monorepo?
I've got a monorepo I'm working in that has a Golang backend with a couple services and a Next.js front-end. Everything lives in a monorepo together. My tooling is super weak, though! For instance, for process management in development I'm using Goreman, which is a Foreman alternative in Goalng. Wondering what's the state of the art for managing the processes in local dev in monorepos in 2024? Or other tools for managing a monorepo I might be missing in general!
Why it failed: I've got a monorepo I'm working in that has a Golang backend with a couple services and a Next.js front-end. Everything lives in a monorepo together. My tooling is super weak, though! For instance, for process management in development I'm using Goreman, which is a
bradhe
- 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
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
Ask HN: How did you replace Teleport?
Teleport is a good software if you can't configure your SSH servers with Kerberos, or can't figure out Kubernetes' millions of authentication and authorisations solutions. Unfortunately, the Teleport open-source version has been discontinued and the free version doesn't allow companies above 100 employees or with more than 10 million dollars of revenue per year. Fair enough, everyone should live well. But Teleport Enterprise is very expensive and I have been priced out. I don't know if I can share the price behind the "contact sales" but if you wonder about the price, you probably are too poor. In my case, it's quite a few orders of magnitude more than the time Teleport saves me. So, I have been looking for a replacement that is open-source and likely to stay open-source for a while. I can pay for it, but I don't have a "contact us"
Why it failed: Teleport is a good software if you can't configure your SSH servers with Kerberos, or can't figure out Kubernetes' millions of authentication and authorisations solutions. Unfortunately, the Teleport open-source version has been discontinued and the free version do
speedgoose
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Open Sourcing Our No-Code WebXR Editor After 5 Years of Development
Transfer Thought is a No-Code platform that makes it so anyone can build VR apps directly in their browser. We started this company part-time, building it during commutes to and from work on the train. Over the last 5 years, we've experienced many ups and downs: - Gained early customers - Quit our day jobs - Secured angel funding - Survived with a short runway - Accepted into Techstars Chicago - Survived with a short runway (again) - Landed our biggest client ever, a Fortune 100 company - Despite our highest revenue, our burn rate caught up to us We looked at different ways to wind down the company and ultimately felt open sourcing the platform was the best way to do right by our customers. Now, anyone who is interested in starting a VR company or just building an app can pick up where we left off. I'm excited about this space, if you need help with a VR app, or want to talk te
Why it failed: Transfer Thought is a No-Code platform that makes it so anyone can build VR apps directly in their browser. We started this company part-time, building it during commutes to and from work on the train. Over the last 5 years, we've experienced many ups and downs: - Gained ear
keenanTT
- startupShut down2024
Show HN: Managed Redux Toolkit: Autogenerate Your RTK Definitions
Redux Toolkit (RTK) provides a lot of primitives to build performant frontend applications. Celestial generates RTK code for your backend (with additional features), exposing an intuitive hook-based API. So you can have all the benefits of RTK without having to familiarise yourself with the underlying framework. Essentially, we write the backend wiring code for your frontend. You get simple-to-use hooks, which implement advanced backend sync & state management patterns. You also get a fast, snappy application out-of-the box. You can also think about it like this: Celestial generates a unified state layer that contains your server state and any other state that you decide to store. It exposes hooks to interact with the state, while constantly keeping client state in sync with the backend. Your UI simply plugs into the state layer using a hook-based API to manage data flow for your web
Why it failed: Redux Toolkit (RTK) provides a lot of primitives to build performant frontend applications. Celestial generates RTK code for your backend (with additional features), exposing an intuitive hook-based API. So you can have all the benefits of RTK without having to familiarise yourse
KritiKay
- 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 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
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: Async tasks in 350 lines of C
Tasks are a primitive for asynchronous programming and an alternative to working with threads directly. Instead of creating a thread, performing work, then waiting on it using synchronization primitives, you only define a unit of work and let a scheduler decide when and where to execute it. The threads that the scheduler uses are created once and reused for many tasks throughout the program's lifetime. In most cases, creating and executing a task requires not even a single syscall and is a significantly faster operation than creating a thread, resulting in lower latency. Furthermore, tasks from different subsystems can be automatically interleaved by the scheduler, which is difficult to achieve manually with threads without communication between the subsystems. The library is written in standard C11 and only depends on the C POSIX library. It is designed to be easy to integrate into
Why it failed: Tasks are a primitive for asynchronous programming and an alternative to working with threads directly. Instead of creating a thread, performing work, then waiting on it using synchronization primitives, you only define a unit of work and let a scheduler decide when and where to
rkaehn
- 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
Tell HN: Google OAuth consent screen issue could be costing you signups
TL;DR: The "Sign in with Google" form doesn't debounce clicks on the "Continue" button, so it can trigger multiple redirect callbacks, in our case causing 15% of signups to fail. We've since reproduced the issue with several other companies' signup flows. What's the issue? A few months ago we (Flat.app) noticed that a meaningful fraction of signups-via-Google to our SaaS product were failing. I recently found out why, so I'm sharing this PSA for anyone facing a similar problem. If your app supports "Sign in with Google", it's likely that new signups will fail if, on Google's OAuth consent screen, a user clicks "Continue" more than once. The error will probably be inscrutable to the user, depending on your setup, so they may just give up instead of trying again. In our case, we were losing around 15% of signups! I
Why it failed: TL;DR: The "Sign in with Google" form doesn't debounce clicks on the "Continue" button, so it can trigger multiple redirect callbacks, in our case causing 15% of signups to fail. We've since reproduced the issue with several other companies' sig
Aalk4308
- 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
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
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
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
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
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
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: 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: 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