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.
2,800 solutions
- 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 On-the-ground reporting has been replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of the other side, and the entire system is in an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: 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
Show HN: Art Diario – Curated art on your desktop every day
Hey HN! I made a little app that changes your desktop background to a new piece of curated art every day. Everyone sees the same art so you can talk to your friends about it! I learned to code a couple years ago from a bootcamp to fulfill a lifelong desire to be able to create end-to-end applications. I've been a designer, I've been a PM, but I really wanted to be able to build the things in my head. This is my first attempt to build something entirely from scratch! This seemed so simple at first. All it does is change your background! But I wanted a fancy little admin panel that allowed me and my wife to upload new art. I wanted to be able to make the crop that ends up on your desktop really straightforward. I wanted it to be cheap to host, so hella caching. Also, omg, timezones! Marketing images and websites! There were so many pieces to this, it is honestly astonishing how m
Why it failed: Hey HN! I made a little app that changes your desktop background to a new piece of curated art every day. Everyone sees the same art so you can talk to your friends about it! I learned to code a couple years ago from a bootcamp to fulfill a lifelong desire to be able to create en
hisnameisjimmy
- 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
Launch HN: Signadot (YC W20) – Lightweight Test Environments for Microservices
Hey everyone, we’re Arjun and Anirudh, founders of Signadot ( https://www.signadot.com/ ). Signadot is a Kubernetes-based solution that enables lightweight environments, called Sandboxes, to test microservices early in the development lifecycle. Before founding Signadot, I managed engineering teams building microservices at different companies. As the number of services and external dependencies (i.e databases, message queues, third-party APIs, etc) increased, testing became challenging. While at a smaller scale, we could stand up our “application in a box”, as the complexity increased, we relied on a pre-production (staging) environment to do a lot of our testing. However since the staging environment was shared by many teams for testing, it became a bottleneck. When issues were discovered on staging, the root-cause analysis took a long time. We talked to many companies a
Why it failed: Hey everyone, we’re Arjun and Anirudh, founders of Signadot ( https://www.signadot.com/ ). Signadot is a Kubernetes-based solution that enables lightweight environments, called Sandboxes, to test microservices early in the development lifecycle. Before founding Sig
jaguar75
- startupShut down2022
Maps.earth – free and open-source web maps
Hey everyone, a while back I posted about an open-source maps project I was working on called Headway. I just wanted to share an exciting update. I made a few architectural improvements with the help of some really awesome contributors and Headway can now run full-planet instances. I'm really excited with what we've managed to come up with. Right now the full-planet demo server is in Germany and lives at [1]. A brief explanation is at [2]. I'm hopeful that the project will continue to improve with time and eventually end up being a real contender in the web maps space. I'm talking with folks about the potential for getting some more robust hosting options too which is very exciting. For the moment though, Headway has some usability issues. It's missing ETAs, has no steps list for directions, or proper geocoding search results page, etc. I'm going to get to t
Why it failed: Hey everyone, a while back I posted about an open-source maps project I was working on called Headway. I just wanted to share an exciting update. I made a few architectural improvements with the help of some really awesome contributors and Headway can now run full-planet instance
ellenhp
- startupShut down2022
I asked Signal motivations for SMS removal
Here is their answer: Hi, Thank you for your thoughts on the announced SMS removal. The blog post describes all of the biggest factors in making this decision, but I know this is a change that is difficult to adjust to, so I wanted to chime in with some additional info that might give some more context. 1. RCS (Rich Communications Services) is coming, and it doesn’t play well with Signal. I once had a situation when I was sending SMS to one of my friends via Signal, but I wasn’t seeing any of their responses – this was because their app was automatically responding via RCS, which wasn’t delivered to Signal. This is going to continue to get worse, and Signal cannot add RCS support because there’s no RCS API on Android. Honestly, the days of any third-party SMS app are numbered. 2. Proper SMS/MMS support is hard. Signal has to support thousands of devices running dozens of versions of
Why it failed: Here is their answer: Hi, Thank you for your thoughts on the announced SMS removal. The blog post describes all of the biggest factors in making this decision, but I know this is a change that is difficult to adjust to, so I wanted to chime in with some additional info that might
quentinus95
- 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: 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: 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
Launch HN: MovingLake (YC S22) – Real-time data connectors for almost anything
Hello HN! We are Andres and Edgar and we are building MovingLake ( https://movinglake.com ). We are creating real-time, bidirectional data connectors which aim to solve automated ETL (eg moving data from an API to Snowflake), reverse ETL (we pipe the data straight to your CRM instead of going through the data warehouse), and transactional integrations (e.g. for an ERP integration) in one swoop. Polling, webhooks, websockets, REST, GraphQL, SOAP—we merge it all into one reliable, replayable, real-time data stream which can be sent anywhere. Here are two demos: Whatsapp to Google Sheets ( https://youtu.be/Qy4eInGgIhw ) and Postgres to Webhooks ( https://youtu.be/cmrkUan8o1w ). Moving data around is still difficult and a pain. Companies spend thousands of hours and lots of money making data pipelines. General solutions are difficult in that there are
Why it failed: Hello HN! We are Andres and Edgar and we are building MovingLake ( https://movinglake.com ). We are creating real-time, bidirectional data connectors which aim to solve automated ETL (eg moving data from an API to Snowflake), reverse ETL (we pipe the data straight to yo
paezand
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: TensorDock Core GPU Cloud – GPU servers from $0.29/hr
Hello HN! I’m Jonathan from TensorDock. After 7 months in beta, we’re finally launching Core Cloud, our platform to deploy GPU virtual machines in as little as 45 seconds! https://www.tensordock.com/product-core Why? Training machine learning workloads at large clouds can be extremely expensive. This left us wondering, “how did cloud ever become more expensive than on-prem?” I’ve seen too many ML startups buy their own hardware. Cheaper dedicated servers with NVIDIA GPUs are not too hard to find, but they lack the functionality and scalability of the big clouds. We thought to ourselves, what if we built a platform that combines the functionality of the large clouds but made it priced somewhere between a dedicated server and the large clouds? That’s exactly what we’ve done. Built to make engineers more productive. We have 3 machine learning images so you can start training
Why it failed: Hello HN! I’m Jonathan from TensorDock. After 7 months in beta, we’re finally launching Core Cloud, our platform to deploy GPU virtual machines in as little as 45 seconds! https://www.tensordock.com/product-core Why? Training machine learning workloads at large clo
jonathanlei
- startupShut down2022
Show HN: Cut your AWS costs by stopping non-production resources when not needed
Hello HN community! Sri and Brian here from CloudPal (https://www.cloudpal.io/). We are building a tool to help companies reduce their cloud costs by stopping non-production resources when they’re not needed. The problem: Almost every company on the cloud struggles with cost management. While optimizing production costs can be complex, reducing non-production costs should be a straightforward case of shutting down resources when they’re not in use. However, most companies lack an elegant solution for this. The solution: CloudPal - A downtime scheduler for non-production resources (currently supports AWS EC2 & RDS) - start / stop button, allowing users to override the schedule (eg. if working on weekends). Next up on the feature roadmap is: - Intelligent start / stop functionality for non-production resources - resources will automatically stop when not in use
Why it failed: Hello HN community! Sri and Brian here from CloudPal (https://www.cloudpal.io/). We are building a tool to help companies reduce their cloud costs by stopping non-production resources when they’re not needed. The problem: Almost every company on the cloud struggles
sriprasanna
- 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
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
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
Tell HN: Google Play blocked payments for Riders app with 1M users
Google blocked our payment profile for Riders App ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitescape... ). After 2 months of providing all of the required docs and getting auto-declines, I've talked to their support and they just answered (quote): "I have consulted our specialist about your account. Our specialist team has determined that this profile must stay suspended due to violations of our Terms of Service. We’re unable to discuss the specific circumstances of this or any suspensions. Our Google Payments Terms of Service states that Google Payments Corp. reserves the right to change, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Services at any time, including availability of the Services, or any Service feature, without notice or liability." The app has nearly 25k of positive ratings and currently one of the most popular apps for act
Why it failed: Google blocked our payment profile for Riders App ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitescape... ). After 2 months of providing all of the required docs and getting auto-declines, I've talked to their support and they just answered
igordebatur
- startupShut down2022
Ask HN: What are you switching to from G Suite legacy free tier?
Google Apps Engine, later G Suite, later Google Workspace, used to have a free tier where you could have a custom domain connected to Google hosted services such as email, drive, calendar, etc, for free. Google have nudged us for years, prompting an upgrade to one of their paid tiers but now they are sunsetting the free tier for good. My question is: what are you switching to, what does it cost and how many users do you have? I'm looking at ProtonMail, Tutanota, Outlook, iCloud and just staying at Google. We have to switch or pay within a month so I'm curious to see if you've landed on anything and if so, why.
Why it failed: Google Apps Engine, later G Suite, later Google Workspace, used to have a free tier where you could have a custom domain connected to Google hosted services such as email, drive, calendar, etc, for free. Google have nudged us for years, prompting an upgrade to one of their paid t
parski
- startupShut down2022
Ring Basic Plan 40% Price Increase
From the 1st of July, Ring's basic plan will cost 40% more. Email: --- We’re continuing to innovate for you, our neighbour. More features are coming to Ring Protect Basic, at a new price. Starting on the 1st July, 2022, we’re expanding the features available for Ring Protect Basic to improve your Ring experience and give you even more peace of mind. With these features, the price of Protect Basic will change from £24.99/year per device to £34.99/year per device. If you don’t want to renew your plan at the new price, you must cancel your subscription before any renewal set to occur on or after the 1st July, 2022. As a reminder, you can cancel by logging in to your account at Ring.com. --- What will you get in return? "Extended Video Storage: You can store your Ring videos for up to 180 days. Video storage defaults to 30 days. Bulk Video Downloads: Download up to 50 vid
Why it failed: From the 1st of July, Ring's basic plan will cost 40% more. Email: --- We’re continuing to innovate for you, our neighbour. More features are coming to Ring Protect Basic, at a new price. Starting on the 1st July, 2022, we’re expanding the features available for Ring Protect
celsoazevedo
- 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
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
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
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: 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