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Ask HN: What interesting project ideas you've got but have no time to work on?

by lewisjoe on 2/6/24, 4:56 PM with 8 comments

Just curious what random, interesting project ideas that HN folks got that they'd like to give away so that people with time can pick up and maybe make it reality.

I for one have a bunch of ideas that I'll probably would never find time to work on:

1. An open-source Notion alternative that works on top of sqlite files (inside browsers). Basically offline first Notion experience.

2. A webassembly powered extension framework to extend business softwares.

3. A bookmarking system that buffers my reading list and drives me to complete my research on a topic - It materialized to a level but I couldn't make it a full fledged product out of it yet - https://github.com/joelewis/readmelater

4. Port prosemirror's technology to a multi-platform stack like Kotlin - so that someday we'll have a cross platform richtext editor component that products can use for both mobile apps and web.

These are just some of my random ideas. I'm curious what others got in their bucket!

  • by solardev on 2/6/24, 9:23 PM

    I would love to see a crowdsourced CDN/web host, organized as a nonprofit/NGO, that just provides basic network services to the masses for minimal profit. Kinda like a public AWS that runs on donations, grants, etc. It would tie in with municipal broadband setups (which can be edge nodes), have unmetered peering with other similar nodes, etc. Kinda like doing what credit unions do in the financial world but for the internet.

    On the frontend side, I wish there was some sort of "universal storefront" app with amazing UX that can generically replace (via API or pass-through clicks) e-commerce sites with poor UX, like Steam or Amazon. By that I mean something super performant, with good filtering, clear price histories, no trash recommendations (maybe using open source and user-customizable algorithms instead). So many of these ecommerce sites have gone down the dark patterns route, I wish there was some frontend to just bypass them altogether, kinda like how we have alternative clients for YouTube, Slack, Discord, etc.

    Both ideas are similar... copying big tech but de-shittifiying them with public effort and resources.

  • by sebastianconcpt on 2/6/24, 5:20 PM

    1. A minimal Smalltalk image with MIT license and without GUI/IDE that would

    2. have a good packaging system to build APIs, Web Applications and easily deploy them in production

    3. A superb TUI that can be the IDE of that Smalltalk

    4. An alternative remote native IDE of that Smalltalk

  • by ilius2 on 2/7/24, 10:08 AM

    A Python code abstract syntax tree (AST) parser and formatter in Go. Because the Python's "ast" modules is too slow, and lacks proper "format" feature (it has unparse but it removes comments, and forgets the current style completely). I use "ruff" a lot (https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff) which is in Rust. But I want to be able to implement fast custom linters in Go (linters that ruff / fixit lack, and Python linters lack or are too slow).

  • by smadam9 on 2/7/24, 9:09 PM

    There was a post a few weeks ago for a site dedicated specifically to this idea: https://getstartupbusinessideas.com/