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 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
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: 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
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
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
Launch HN: Vocode (YC W23) – Library for voice conversation with LLMs
Hey everyone! Kian and Ajay here from Vocode–an open source library for building LLM applications you can talk to. Vocode makes it easy to take any text-based LLM and make it voice-based. Our repo is at https://github.com/vocodedev/vocode-python and our docs are at https://docs.vocode.dev . Building realtime voice apps with LLMs is powerful but hard. You have to orchestrate the speech recognition, LLM, and speech synthesis in real-time (all async)–while handling the complexity of conversation (like understanding when someone is finished speaking or handling interruptions). Our library is easy to get up and running–you can set up a conversation in <15 lines of code. Check out our Gen Z GPT hotline demo: https://replit.com/@vocode/Gen-Z-Phone (try it out at +1-650-729-9536). It all started with our PrankGPT project that we built for fun
Why it failed: Hey everyone! Kian and Ajay here from Vocode–an open source library for building LLM applications you can talk to. Vocode makes it easy to take any text-based LLM and make it voice-based. Our repo is at https://github.com/vocodedev/vocode-python and our docs a
KianHooshmand
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: MiniSearch, a minimalist search engine with integrated browser-based AI
Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-LLM and Transformers.js to provide browser-based text-generation models on desktop and mobile, I built a minimalist self-hosted search app on which an AI analyses the results, comments on them and responds to your query summarising the info. In the backend, it still queries a real search engine, but besides that, there's no other remote connection happening. For running in the browser and on mobiles, lightweight models are required, so we can't expect them to give stellar answers, but there are a few advantages of using this over the services as mentioned earlier: - Availability: The AI will always be av
Why it failed: Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-L
felladrin
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Stuck at $500 MRR and Seeking Distribution/Marketing Advice
Hey everyone! I'm Milan, founder of Robofy, an AI chatbot tool I've poured countless hours into. Robofy is live for around 3 months now. Our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) has been stagnant at around $500 for the last 3 months, which has been a tad frustrating. I rebranded in June to Robofy but still am stuck at $500 and I am looking for fresh ideas. One thing I've noticed is an extremely large number of similar products popping up in the market. It's both exciting and scary because it confirms a demand, but also adds that much more competition. I think most of the competitors are coming up because of the cookbook published by OpenAI and the progress made by Langchain. Nevertheless, here's where I need your help: Marketing: I've tried the basic marketing channel's (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) but the ROI hasn't been great. In fact, I would say
Why it failed: Hey everyone! I'm Milan, founder of Robofy, an AI chatbot tool I've poured countless hours into. Robofy is live for around 3 months now. Our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) has been stagnant at around $500 for the last 3 months, which has been a tad frustrating. I rebra
milanspeaks
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: go-nbd – A Pure Go NBD Server and Client
Hey HN! I just released go-nbd, a lightweight Go library for effortlessly creating NBD servers and clients. Its a neat tool for creating custom Linux block devices with arbitrary backends, such as a file, byte slice or what I'm planning to use it for, a tape drive. While there are a few partially abandoned projects like this out there already, this library tries to be as maintainable as possible by only implementing the most recent handshake revision and baseline functionality for both the client and the server, while still having enough support to be useful. I'd love to get your feedback :)
Why it failed: Hey HN! I just released go-nbd, a lightweight Go library for effortlessly creating NBD servers and clients. Its a neat tool for creating custom Linux block devices with arbitrary backends, such as a file, byte slice or what I'm planning to use it for, a tape drive. While the
pojntfx
- 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
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: Paychecks from a failed startup?
Hey - I was recently laid off from an early stage start up (Pre-Series A) and haven't received my last two paychecks. Do I have any legal avenues to recoup these missed payments? I've opened a case with the state DOL office but I'm worried the company will fold / file for bankruptcy. Does anyone have a similar experience? Any luck getting missed paychecks? Should I attempt to sue the founder?
Why it failed: Hey - I was recently laid off from an early stage start up (Pre-Series A) and haven't received my last two paychecks. Do I have any legal avenues to recoup these missed payments? I've opened a case with the state DOL office but I'm worried the company will fold &#x
skinsfan687
- 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
Ask HN: How can I meaningfully object to WhatsApp processing of my information?
Following some EU requirements (GDPR), WhatsApp updated their TOS. They say that we can now "object to [their] use of [our] information": https://faq.whatsapp.com/781249240131848/. When following the form, I receive an e-mail saying: > Hi, > Thanks for your message. > In order for us to review your objection, please reply to this email with > the following information: > - What information processing you are objecting to. Your right to object applies where we rely on legitimate interest to process your information. > - How WhatsApp’s processing of this information impacts you (example: what rights and freedoms you believe are impacted by the processing and why) > - Any additional information you believe will help us review your objection (optional) > We may ask you for more information if your request is incomplete. > Thanks, Whats
Why it failed: Following some EU requirements (GDPR), WhatsApp updated their TOS. They say that we can now "object to [their] use of [our] information": https://faq.whatsapp.com/781249240131848/. When following the form, I receive an e-mail saying: > Hi, > Th
_8ysf
- 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
Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
Hello. I'm 17, I've loved computers since I was 5. I'm a pretty decent programmer, I've done some big projects, worked with teams on extended projects, and have a pretty decent understanding of programming/linux/networking/security/etc. I generally write C, Rust, Python, and TS. I attend a STEM school that specialises in CS and engineering, and I'm in my first year of A Levels (UK) studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics, and Computer Science. I'm on track to get As and A*s. The plan 6 months ago was - get good grades, go to a good uni, get a CS degree while doing programming to pay for uni/do a degree apprenticeship, and go into a CS career. Without LLMs messing the world up, I think it's a pretty good plan. I'm a good programmer for my age and I'm academic. However, with recent developments, that seems borderline fool
Why it failed: Hello. I'm 17, I've loved computers since I was 5. I'm a pretty decent programmer, I've done some big projects, worked with teams on extended projects, and have a pretty decent understanding of programming/linux/networking/security/etc. I g
ShouldIPivot
- 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
Tell HN: Farewell letter of M. Hosseini – executed 01.02.2023 by I.R. of Iran
Hello, to all the people of the world. I am Mohammad Hosseini, a prisoner in one of the dreaded prisons of the Iranian government. A man who had no one, no mother, father or family, but who was a friend of all the goodness in the world. After days and nights of resistance under severe torture, they forced me to confess the lie they wanted to hear and the crime I had not committed. In the dawn of tomorrow, at the foot of the gallows, I will look up to the sky for the last time, see the last star and cry out with all my strength, "Woman, life, freedom". I will cry out in the name of justice and in the hope of a world without violence, a world that loves nature and that is safe for all the children of the world. For me, who has been deeply lonely all his life, in a country where working children have not known justice, my only wish is that the world be a place where all children c
Why it failed: Hello, to all the people of the world. I am Mohammad Hosseini, a prisoner in one of the dreaded prisons of the Iranian government. A man who had no one, no mother, father or family, but who was a friend of all the goodness in the world. After days and nights of resistance under s
eternalban
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Hypertune – Visual, functional, statically-typed configuration language
Hey HN! I'm Miraan, the founder at Hypertune. Hypertune lets you make your code configurable to let teammates like PMs and marketers quickly change in-app copy, feature flags, pricing plans, etc, with logic for personalization, A/B testing and ML. It's like a CMS but instead of just letting you set static content, you can insert arbitrary logic from the UI, including A/B tests and ML. I previously built a landing page optimization tool that let marketers define variations of their headline, CTA, cover image, etc, then used a genetic algorithm to find the best combination of them. They used my Chrome extension to define changes on DOM elements based on their unique CSS selector. But this broke when the underlying page changed and didn't work with sites that used CSS modules. Developers hated it. I took a step back. The problem I was trying to solve was making the
Why it failed: Hey HN! I'm Miraan, the founder at Hypertune. Hypertune lets you make your code configurable to let teammates like PMs and marketers quickly change in-app copy, feature flags, pricing plans, etc, with logic for personalization, A/B testing and ML. It's like a CMS b
miraantabrez
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Interactive exercises for stress and anxiety that respond to breathing
Hey HN! I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pia ( https://www.piahealth.co ) which developed Lungy ( https://www.lungy.app ). Lungy is an app (iOS only for now) that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It’s been one year since Lungy launched (here’s the original ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34534615 ) - I was absolutely delighted with the response. One year on, we have re-designed and rebuilt the whole app, and added a real-time, 3D soft body solver which gives some really cool interactions like blobs / objects that inflate as you breathe. My background is as a junior surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were huge numbers of patients coming off ventilators and patients are o
Why it failed: Hey HN! I’m an NHS doctor and the founder of Pia ( https://www.piahealth.co ) which developed Lungy ( https://www.lungy.app ). Lungy is an app (iOS only for now) that responds to breathing in real-time and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging
lukko
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Arroyo – Write SQL on streaming data
Hey HN, Arroyo is a modern, open-source stream processing engine, that lets anyone write complex queries on event streams just by writing SQL—windowing, aggregating, and joining events with sub-second latency. Today data processing typically happens in batch data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake despite the fact that most of the data is coming in as streams. Data teams have to build complex orchestration systems to handle late-arriving data and job failures while trying to minimize latency. Stream processing offers an alternative approach, where the query is compiled into a streaming program that constantly updates as new data comes in, providing low-latency results as soon as the data is available. I started the Arroyo project after spending the past five years building real-time platforms at Lyft and Splunk. I saw first hand how hard it is for users to build correct, reliable pip
Why it failed: Hey HN, Arroyo is a modern, open-source stream processing engine, that lets anyone write complex queries on event streams just by writing SQL—windowing, aggregating, and joining events with sub-second latency. Today data processing typically happens in batch data warehouses like
necubi
- 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
Ask HN: How do you help junior devs improve faster?
For some context, I run a self-funded consultancy and I have about 5 years of experience in marketing and another 5 years of experience in programming. Over the years, I'm able to help onboard junior marketers & junior designers to be productive by the 3rd month. Enough that they get fantastic results for our clients and they also get better career opportunities by the 3rd or 4th year (1.5x-2x pay than what I can afford as a self-funded company). While this is somewhat a problem for me, I'm confident with our marketing & design training program. But for the life of me, I can't figure junior devs. I've been training this one guy for 2 years and still can't keep up. I've also hired another guy and he's a bit better, but he doesn't follow coding standards and still cannot ship good code. For the SaaS that we are building, while I thought that
Why it failed: For some context, I run a self-funded consultancy and I have about 5 years of experience in marketing and another 5 years of experience in programming. Over the years, I'm able to help onboard junior marketers & junior designers to be productive by the 3rd month. Enough
productized
- 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