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 down2022
Ask HN: How do you organize your routine?
As a freelancer I often found my self with too much work or too little work, I have no problem with the first case but with the latter one. When I'm in those days of little to none work I've found my self lost in the days and time with the constant thought "What should I be doing now?". I think that an structured routine should help me organize through the day but whenever I search online for an "optimal" formula, I end up with generic SEO crap like organize your meals and take vitamins. I'd like to know how other engineers that don't have a strict work schedule manage to organize the spare time without the feeling that you are wasting your precious and short life time.
Why it failed: As a freelancer I often found my self with too much work or too little work, I have no problem with the first case but with the latter one. When I'm in those days of little to none work I've found my self lost in the days and time with the constant thought "What sh
Sectumbra
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Will I Ever Recover?
Been working in my startup for the last 7 years. It has no failed and I am turning 37 soon. I am interview now but my identity has been shattered. I don’t know how to build myself back up. Everyone tells me it’s not too late to start again but I am no longer young. I feel so miserable.
Why it failed: Been working in my startup for the last 7 years. It has no failed and I am turning 37 soon. I am interview now but my identity has been shattered. I don’t know how to build myself back up. Everyone tells me it’s not too late to start again but I am no longer young. I feel so mise
answerme
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: The case for middle men in freelancing, do agents exist?
As a self-employed senior software developer, I mostly live off selected freelance work, aside from varying income through SaaS products and apps. I get 100% of inbound work through recommendations in my personal network. Because of that, I have never had a rate negotiation, had to pitch my skills or expertise, or bid against others. But, sometimes, I go WEEKS without a single hour billed. Other times, I need to decline two projects at once because I am still knuckle-deep in another one. Which reminded me of "agents" as a concept: I think I would be happy to pay someone a fee for managing inbound work (on my terms). The TV (script or talent) agent model comes to mind: they try to fill up your unbooked time with projects that match your criteria. For each booked gig, they get a fee. Does that exist? Would that even make sense in software development? The main argument against it
Why it failed: As a self-employed senior software developer, I mostly live off selected freelance work, aside from varying income through SaaS products and apps. I get 100% of inbound work through recommendations in my personal network. Because of that, I have never had a rate negotiation, had
mittermayr
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: What tool would you buy to make your life easier?
Could be anything - dev tools, blogging platforms, SaaS... Mine would be some (hypothetical) way of making it so I could see what accounts I had with any given service (Trello, GitHub, etc), what signin methods they used (password, social, etc), and could merge/rename/delete accounts and signin methods without going through tedious confirmation processes or support tickets. Something about having a fragile web of interconnected user/password combos and email accounts makes me anxious whenever I think about it or create a new account somewhere. Almost every service I've used seems to make big assumptions behind the scenes about what to do when someone invites you to a team using email, for example, and you already have an account using GitHub signin - so you end up having either two different accounts or merged accounts when you don't want to.
Why it failed: Could be anything - dev tools, blogging platforms, SaaS... Mine would be some (hypothetical) way of making it so I could see what accounts I had with any given service (Trello, GitHub, etc), what signin methods they used (password, social, etc), and could merge/rename/d
throwaway68642
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Do failed engineer founders have trouble getting hired?
Asking for a friend who believes this to be the case. If you raised money but eventually your startup failed, would you as founder of a SaaS company have more trouble getting hired as a senior engineer than if you had never founded a company? I find this hard to believe but I could be totally wrong.
Why it failed: Asking for a friend who believes this to be the case. If you raised money but eventually your startup failed, would you as founder of a SaaS company have more trouble getting hired as a senior engineer than if you had never founded a company? I find this hard to believe but I cou
dartmouthcoach
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: Google is deleting people's recorded TV shows from YouTube TV
Google just sent out this announcement about YouTube TV: > We have been informed that G4TV is ceasing operations for all distributors. Starting November 9, 2022, the G4 channel will no longer be available on YouTube TV. You will also lose access to any previous Library recordings from this channel. (emphasis mine) Imagine if 20 years ago, whenever a TV channel went away, if they had sent goons to everyone's houses to rub magnets over everyone's VHS tapes of anything from that channel, to completely memoryhole it. How is this any different than that?
Why it failed: Google just sent out this announcement about YouTube TV: > We have been informed that G4TV is ceasing operations for all distributors. Starting November 9, 2022, the G4 channel will no longer be available on YouTube TV. You will also lose access to any previous Library recordi
josephcsible
- startupShut down2022
Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
Hey HN! We’re Nish, Liusha and Neil, the founders of Nimbus ( https://www.usenimbus.com ). We’re building an easy way to code and manage environments on cloud VMs that are configured for projects you’re working on. There’s a video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g6Jk5zyQG4 . Initially, we were working on simplifying dev environments for coding school students. But when we found ourselves using what we were making and finding it useful for our own work, we pivoted to dev teams like us. Big tech companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Shopify, Slack, Dropbox, etc. all have in-house cloud environment solutions. This lets engineers spend more time on software design and writing production code and less time waiting, testing or troubleshooting. With Nimbus, we’re bringing the same convenience to everybody else. The three biggest pains Nimbus alleviates are comp
Why it failed: Hey HN! We’re Nish, Liusha and Neil, the founders of Nimbus ( https://www.usenimbus.com ). We’re building an easy way to code and manage environments on cloud VMs that are configured for projects you’re working on. There’s a video demo here: https://www.youtub
liushh
- startupShut down2022
Launch HN: Helio Sleep (YC S21) – One-stop portal for sleep apnea
Hello HN! We’re Helio Sleep ( https://www.heliosleep.com ). We help treat sleep apnea at home using sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices, and board-certified physicians. We prescribe and deliver medical equipment, so that patients can get care affordably and easily from their homes. An estimated 30M Americans suffer from sleep apnea. Getting diagnosis, treatment devices, and ongoing support can be difficult, and is getting harder, because fewer physicians are practicing sleep medicine. There is a serious "conversion funnel" problem. 50% of patients give up before making it to a sleep specialist; of those that get to a sleep specialist, 50% don't get a sleep study; and of those that do get care, more than a third fail to continue within 6 months. As a result, 24M Americans are currently untreated, leaving them tired and also at risk for serious health prob
Why it failed: Hello HN! We’re Helio Sleep ( https://www.heliosleep.com ). We help treat sleep apnea at home using sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices, and board-certified physicians. We prescribe and deliver medical equipment, so that patients can get care affordably and eas
maxgreenfeld
- startupShut down2022
Tell HN: My early access eBook over iOS made $120k in 1 year
Hey HN - I mostly stay in the shadows here, but for the one year anniversary of my first (ebook project)[1] I figured I'd write a blurb in case it's interesting to anyone. I'm terrible at launching things, and take years to ship my own apps. After my last app was acquired, I wanted to fulfill a "moon shot" goal of mine - write a book in any form. I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series (one for each topic of accessibility, design, UX, APIs and a catch all bonus one). So far it has sold 1,534 copies and has made over $124,000. Now that things have settled, it makes about $2k a month on average. I learned from my own launch history and decide to launch it in "early access", otherwise I'd never finish it. Launching it went great and was a day I'll never f
Why it failed: Hey HN - I mostly stay in the shadows here, but for the one year anniversary of my first (ebook project)[1] I figured I'd write a blurb in case it's interesting to anyone. I'm terrible at launching things, and take years to ship my own apps. After my last app was a
jordanmorgan10
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: General Task, a free task manager for builders (beta)
Hello everyone! I left my job to start General Task a little over a year ago, and have been building a better free task manager with a small team. We aim to be the best place where one can find what’s next in their workday and we integrate with a number of different services to help do that. We’re still in the early stages of a beta, but so far you can: - Create/edit tasks with due dates, priorities, and folders - Drag tasks onto your calendar to block off time to do them (syncs with GCal) - Sync with Linear (JIRA coming soon) to see tasks assigned to you - Sync with Github to see your PRs - Integrate with Slack to make tasks directly from Slack What sets us apart? We know there are tons of task managers out there. We believe ours is different because it is tailor-made for engineers, with integrations for Github PRs, Linear and Slack. We also support dragging tasks onto your calenda
Why it failed: Hello everyone! I left my job to start General Task a little over a year ago, and have been building a better free task manager with a small team. We aim to be the best place where one can find what’s next in their workday and we integrate with a number of different services to h
jreinstra
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Makers.so – A website builder inside Figma
Founder here. Makers.so is a Figma Plugin to build and publish sites without ever leaving Figma. Here’s a demo [0]. As a front-end developer I constantly go from Figma to code / site, but it’s tedious… I decided to automate the process with this plugin. It works great for simple projects like: - Landing Pages - Portfolio / Personal sites - Resume sites - Careers / Wiki sites So, not a Webflow / Framer competitor (yet). Webflow and Framer are amazing tools, but if you are in the Figma ecosystem, it's boring to duplicate your work on a different tool. I'm trying to make life easier for Figma users. If this seems interesting, you can install it here [1] and give it a try. — For a bit of context, I'm a solo-founder and I started Makers after sharing my idea on the Figma subreddit about how awesome it would be to have a button in Figma to publish my designs.
Why it failed: Founder here. Makers.so is a Figma Plugin to build and publish sites without ever leaving Figma. Here’s a demo [0]. As a front-end developer I constantly go from Figma to code / site, but it’s tedious… I decided to automate the process with this plugin. It works great for si
johndamaia
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Dassana. JSON-native,schema-less logging solution built atop ClickHouse
Hello HN, I’m Gaurav. Founder & CEO of Dassana. We are coming out of stealth today and would like to invite the community to give us a try. https://lake.dassana.io/ First, a bit of a backstory. I grew up with grep to search log files. The kind of person whose grep was aliased to grep -i . Then came along Splunk. It was a game-changer. For every single start-up I started (there are a few) I used Splunk and quite often we will run out of our ingestion quota. SumoLogic wasn’t cheaper either so we looked into DataDog. It was good until we started running issues with aggregate queries (facets etc), rehydration takes forever and the overall query experience is not fun (it wasn’t fun with Splunk and SumoLogic either). All these experiences over the last two decades led me to wish for a simple solution where I can just throw a bunch of JSON/CSV data and query it with simp
Why it failed: Hello HN, I’m Gaurav. Founder & CEO of Dassana. We are coming out of stealth today and would like to invite the community to give us a try. https://lake.dassana.io/ First, a bit of a backstory. I grew up with grep to search log files. The kind of person whose g
gauravphoenix
- startupShut down2022
Launch HN: Prequel (YC W21) – Sync data to your customer’s data warehouse
Hey HN! We’re Conor and Charles from Prequel ( https://prequel.co ). We make it easy for B2B companies to send data to their customers. Specifically, we help companies sync data directly to their customer's data warehouse, on an ongoing basis. We’re building Prequel because we think the current ETL paradigm isn’t quite right. Today, it’s still hard to get data out of SaaS tools: customers have to write custom code to scrape APIs, or procure third-party tools like Fivetran to get access to their data. In other words, the burden of data exports is on the customer. We think this is backwards! Instead, vendors should make it seamless for their customers to export data to their data warehouse. Not only does this make the customer’s life easier, it benefits the vendor too: they now have a competitive advantage, and they get to generate new revenue if they choose to charge for th
Why it failed: Hey HN! We’re Conor and Charles from Prequel ( https://prequel.co ). We make it easy for B2B companies to send data to their customers. Specifically, we help companies sync data directly to their customer's data warehouse, on an ongoing basis. We’re building Preque
ctc24
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Perspectives for Ukrainian programmer coming to US as a war refugee?
Hello, I'm from Ukraine and my town Mariupol has been destroyed. I escaped to Russia and now I'm looking for a place to live and rebuild my life. A good friend agreed to sponsor me and my parents via a Uniting for Ukraine program, so that we can come and stay in US for 2 years that the program covers. I don't have wife or kids, and my brother is currently in a different city. I'm 34. Considering that USA has huge tech market, it seems like a great proposition career wise, plus I know English already. But I worry about perspectives of such move. Will companies want to hire me knowing that my status is temporary and quite short at that (2 years)? Even if company likes me and is ready to propose a work visa it looks like there is a high chance that I don't get the visa. Then what, the end? I go home (to the ruins of it) at the end of 2 years? Is there a path towards
Why it failed: Hello, I'm from Ukraine and my town Mariupol has been destroyed. I escaped to Russia and now I'm looking for a place to live and rebuild my life. A good friend agreed to sponsor me and my parents via a Uniting for Ukraine program, so that we can come and stay in US for
arifmeticus
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Onin – E2EE calendar and chat app
Hey HN! Ryan here (co-founder of YC-backed Muzz). I’m now building Onin, an end-to-end encrypted calendar and chat app that makes organising your personal and social life simple and secure. I’ve been building technology businesses for 10+ years and have witnessed the reoccurring problem that digital calendars were built for companies, not people. They feel cold, transactional, and anti-social — not the thing of dreams for planning your personal life. They also lack the security we now come to expect from consumer products. Onin is the first calendar to be fully E2EE, protecting not just your events, but your messages and even your profile. Unlike existing E2EE calendars, you cannot share Onin events to others without the protection of E2EE. When you consider how much personal information your calendar stores about you and your loved ones’ lives, we think this is essential. With such a fo
Why it failed: Hey HN! Ryan here (co-founder of YC-backed Muzz). I’m now building Onin, an end-to-end encrypted calendar and chat app that makes organising your personal and social life simple and secure. I’ve been building technology businesses for 10+ years and have witnessed the reoccurring
brod_ie
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: A Full-Stack Web Framework for Go
Hey HN! I want to share my side project with you. It's called Bud and it's a full-stack web framework for Go. I created a short video to show you how to create a minimal Hacker News clone with Bud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoypcRqn-xA . The framework is free, open source and MIT Licensed. You can find it on Github: https://github.com/livebud/bud . I started working on Bud 2 years ago after watching the introductory Laracast videos about the Laravel web framework. I was just blown away by how productive you can be in Laravel. However, like many of you, I've been so spoiled by Go. I didn't want to go back to writing PHP, so I decided to try creating Laravel for the Go ecosystem. At this point, I just had the following goal: • Be as productive as Laravel in a typed language like Go. I got the first version working in 6 months and
Why it failed: Hey HN! I want to share my side project with you. It's called Bud and it's a full-stack web framework for Go. I created a short video to show you how to create a minimal Hacker News clone with Bud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoypcRqn-xA . The framewo
matthewmueller
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Should I go on sabbatical even if I'm afraid of it?
Hello guys, I'm a 39-year old Italian software engineer with 10 years of experience, and I'm afraid of going on a sabbatical. My background is quite different from my peers: even though I have a respectable and loveable family, when I was a young adult, I left my studies after secondary school and made a lot of mistakes and wrong decisions that eventually led me to commit different crimes, including a robbery, for which I spent some time in jail. After that experience, I was in my 20s, finding a job was hard, and I only worked as blue-collar for small-term jobs. I also started suffering anxiety and panic attacks, and I was afraid of many things, especially working and finding a job. While working temporarily in a call center, I decided to go to an evening school to have more options on the table, and when I was 25, I successfully took a high school diploma in IT. My goal was to
Why it failed: Hello guys, I'm a 39-year old Italian software engineer with 10 years of experience, and I'm afraid of going on a sabbatical. My background is quite different from my peers: even though I have a respectable and loveable family, when I was a young adult, I left my studie
gabrieledarrigo
- startupShut down2022
Remind HN: Heroku will delete all free dbs and shut down all free dynos Monday
For other HN'ers out there who have personal projects on Heroku and might've forgotten (like I did), this weekend is the last chance to get data out of Heroku (or upgrade to paid plans) before it deletes databases/Redis and shuts down free dynos on Monday. > What products are impacted by the removal of free plans? > > `free` dynos, `hobby-dev` Heroku Postgres, and `hobby-dev` Heroku Data for Redis plans. > > What happens if I take no action on my free apps or databases or do not upgrade to a paid plan? > > If you take no action by November 28, 2022: > > - `free` dynos will be converted to `eco` dynos scaled down to 0. You must subscribe to the Eco dyno hours plan or upgrade to another paid plan before you can scale them up again. Any Scheduler jobs that used free dynos will fail until they are reconfigured to use another dyno type. > - For non
Why it failed: For other HN'ers out there who have personal projects on Heroku and might've forgotten (like I did), this weekend is the last chance to get data out of Heroku (or upgrade to paid plans) before it deletes databases/Redis and shuts down free dynos on Monday. > Wha
nja
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: Elevator Pitch for a Polymath?
Dear HN, So far in my (admittedly fairly short, at 7--8 years experience) professional life, I've always entered employment as a software engineer. However, I study a lot of things outside of this: leadership, economics, site reliability engineering, writing, queuing theory, product development, extreme value theory, lean, survival analysis, etc. This means when I find the right employer, my job often extends well beyond the programming I was hired to do, into things like: - statistical analysis of customer health, - cross-functional KPIs for alignment on current priorities over a diverse set of departments, - improving development methodologies and workflows, - adjusting on-call compensation to improve join rates and employee satisfaction, and more. Over and over I encounter the advice to "come up with and practise the elevator pitch of what you do". I struggle with this.
Why it failed: Dear HN, So far in my (admittedly fairly short, at 7--8 years experience) professional life, I've always entered employment as a software engineer. However, I study a lot of things outside of this: leadership, economics, site reliability engineering, writing, queuing theory,
kqr
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Throw – The new space for asking and answering questions anonymously
Hello HN community, For the past year 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 that
Why it failed: Hello HN community, For the past year 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
luisamodio
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: How to take first steps to escape burnout?
For the first time in my decade long career I'm deeply burned out. I've been feeling this way for at least the past 3 months. The smallest of tasks feel like moving a mountain which leads to procrastination and then no feeling of success when completing a task that my bosses feel is already late. I've never been anything but a top performer before. I've thought and written about why I feel like this. It's a swirling combination of lack of autonomy or strategic involvement, working on a codebase that requires a lot of effort to wrangle (single digit millions of lines of code), in languages (C++, Python) I don't enjoy or want to master, with really bad tools and long feedback loops, on a team with hardly any camaraderie, and a roadmap that isn't very exciting to me. The job pays well but all in all I don't feel anything like myself. I once was incred
Why it failed: For the first time in my decade long career I'm deeply burned out. I've been feeling this way for at least the past 3 months. The smallest of tasks feel like moving a mountain which leads to procrastination and then no feeling of success when completing a task that my b
throwawaystuck
- startupShut down2022
Need some advice, feeling depressed about the direction of our industry
First post here. It's 2 AM and can't sleep. I'm 40 and the majority of my experience has been in Java. Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, what you'd expect. I'm pretty much at the top of my game (which I know is specifically Java, but bare with me). We all know technology constantly changes and progresses, and I've always thought that's fine, I'll be happy to learn whatever replaces Java because it will be better, right? I've seen Go coming along, Kotlin too. But I've been hit like a brick in the face to realize where we're headed. AWS. The cloud. I'll get to the point. I hate it. I've seen it happen personally at two companies now. The transition to the cloud. Where we throw away everything we've spent years learning to reinvent the wheel. We throw away relational databases for MongoDB. I love SQL. I'm good at it. B
Why it failed: First post here. It's 2 AM and can't sleep. I'm 40 and the majority of my experience has been in Java. Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, what you'd expect. I'm pretty much at the top of my game (which I know is specifically Java, but bare with me). We all k
clouded
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Narratives Project – A news product for a more peaceful internet
Hey HN! I’m Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project (https://www.narrativesproject.com/), a non-profit that presents divisive news events as contrasting narratives to show why people disagree. Our goal is to lower people’s distress about the news and animosity towards those they disagree with. Our current news media system incites instead of informs. On-the-ground reporting has been replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of the other side, and the entire system is in an escalating panic about Those Bad People Over There. People of different political persuasions look at the same event and immediately come to different conclusions, and often become agitated with those on the other side. When asked why others disagree, they usually give one of four answers: they're stupid, ignorant, br
Why it failed: Hey HN! I’m Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project (https://www.narrativesproject.com/), a non-profit that presents divisive news events as contrasting narratives to show why people disagree. Our goal is to lower people’s distress about the news and animosity
ShaunCammack
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Embed a snow effect on your website
Embed a snow effect on your website with one line of code (~1.3kB), and add some Christmas magic to your websites. A quick weekend project :)
Why it failed: Embed a snow effect on your website with one line of code (~1.3kB), and add some Christmas magic to your websites. A quick weekend project :)
ksimon