Ask HN: What's your app idea that you don't have the time or motivation to build

I suddenly have some time on my hands and would like to use some of that time to write some code and learn some of this new fangled tech that all the cool kids are talking about.

Would love some inspiration and hear about your idea that has always been in the back of your mind that you could neither find the time or motivation to get going. Whether it's a dev tool or a todo list for your family, I'd love to build something that helps improve a Hackers life.

6 points | by jasondigitized 1 day ago

18 comments

  • bilsbie 1 hour ago
    A dating app but only for average or below looking people. Maybe it’s as simple as you get kicked off if you get too many dates? Or people could report you as too attractive?
  • bilsbie 1 hour ago
    A jobs app but candidates can only apply to one job per week. Employers must respond to any application before they’re allowed to get the next one.
  • bilsbie 1 hour ago
    Interests matcher- paste subscribed subreddits into form and get matched up with people with most common interests
  • mikewarot 1 day ago
    An actual implementation of Memex. That is, a web browser that records everything to a local cache, so that at any point later, you can annotate it, and give full and complete copies of what you've seen to your friends.

    After a set period of time, things without annotations could roll off into the trash bin, waiting to be purged.

    Given the size of modern disk systems, it should be no problem to store everything someone watches, reads, listens to, and decides to keep, for as long as they like.

    [-]
    • Jeremy1026 1 day ago
      My network has downloaded 1.08TB of bandwidth over the last month, according to my ISP's router. Now, that is across multiple devices, but my laptop with its 1TB internal storage is likely at least 1/3rd of that. Which mean given no OS or local files, I'd be able to store about 9 months of my browsing in your proposed product. With OS and local files, I'm looking at closer to 1-2 months. This isn't really feasible for average consumers.
      [-]
      • mikewarot 23 hours ago
        To make it reasonable, most content would be purged after a set amount of time. The other option is to re-encode video, graphics, etc.. at a lower fidelity
  • gradschool 20 hours ago
    I think it would be profitable to write a smartphone app that takes the floor plan of a trade show or exhibition hall with the exhibitors' booths shown, allows the user to select the booths he or she wants to visit, and solves the travelling salesman problem. I wonder if it could be licensed to trade show organizers for big bucks by offering kickbacks on all the extras. The extras could include bribes from exhibitors for the heuristic to favor paths that go by them, or that get users to visit them ahead of their competitors, or that push promotions to users redeemable at the booth but only within the next five minutes, or that lets exhibitors buy a list of the names of everyone who selected their booth, or lets them buy a list of the other booths those people also selected, etc..
  • muzani 15 hours ago
    I still want a better todo list.

    It's daily. Probably pulls stuff from a backlog. Maybe with deadlines, item 1 by 10 AM, (2) by 10.30 AM, (3) by 2 PM. Alternatively, it rolls a dice and tells me what to do next so there's no paralysis analysis.

    Probably some task grouping, like if you're going to the bank, there's these tasks like buying a capacitor from the store next to the bank.

    It'll break down a complex task into estimates. This can be done pretty easily with AI and RAG, and I'd be happy to pay small amounts for this.

  • ActorNightly 23 hours ago
    Basically a docker image that can be hosted in the cloud (or on public facing machine), that allows you to "connect" any device, including your phone, to any other device. Kinda like ngrok but at the application layer. The idea is that you have a library that integrates with your web service running on localhost that defines an API, which then is publically accessible (with authentication) on the cloud container.

    The use case would be just being able to interface with your stuff at home without a 3d party solution, in a programmatic way. So you can offload LLM inference, access stuff on your local network, and so on.

    Additionally, the docker image should include ways to mesh with other instances, so you can form at hoc networks of devices.

    [-]
    • PLG88 9 hours ago
      Sounds like ngrok SDKs (https://ngrok.com/categories/sdks), but its closed source so I guess falls foul of your 3rd party solution comment.

      Another option could be zrok (https://zrok.io/), which is an alternative that is open source, and also includes SDKs - https://blog.openziti.io/the-zrok-sdk.

      I work on its parent project, OpenZiti, which also may fit your idea. Either way, its a programmatic way to embed connectivity into your app, making it accessible anywhere, but only to people who have authenticated and authorised, its others invisible.

    • ghoshbishakh 20 hours ago
      Sounds like something that can be done with pinggy - https://pinggy.io
      [-]
      • PLG88 9 hours ago
        Lacks the SDKs which provide the "at the application layer" the commenter requires.
    • ATechGuy 21 hours ago
      Could you use ngrok and dropbox to put together something like this quickly?
  • 1ste 21 hours ago
    geocities style site with AI. A website that gives everyone a blank page. Then the user can interact with an LLM/AI to build out the page. User1 might add a feed of X/Y/Z related tweets/bsky posts. User2 might have a section on their page for motivational quotes, a todo section and top news in the UK. User3 might have a different rock song everyday etc.

    I thought of this earlier today and wasn't going to make it but now that I've typed it out it is tempting.

    pages.ai is available (... for €95,840!)

  • andyish 1 day ago
    Something along the lines of LinkedIn and the company announcement part of twitter.

    I, and im sure many others, can do without the stream of BS that comes out of LinkedIn. But as far as an online job history and to search for companies, it's quite useful.

    [-]
    • quintes 22 hours ago
      What do you mean by the ‘company announcement part of Twitter’?
      [-]
      • andyish 4 hours ago
        Slight delay, but yeah. what sky2224 said.

        For some time Twitter seems to have been the defacto real time announcement tool for companies. Now Twitter has been made private seems ripe to be replaced by a startup.

      • sky2224 22 hours ago
        Not OP, but it's nice to be kept up to date on what companies are doing, who is hiring, stuff like that. I frequently see managers announcing positions on LinkedIn, but I couldn't care less about the borderline sociopathic posting some people do.
        [-]
        • quintes 21 hours ago
          Ah yep agreed on the first but hard to build a platform like that without the network

          I was just on LinkedIn now and gee the people are posting nonsense. That feed is full of ick

          [-]
          • andyish 4 hours ago
            If you could filter out everything except the automated 'new job' and 'new skill' posts and mix in some company press releases it would be so much better.
  • nbbaier 1 day ago
    I have a PhD in linguistics and have always been baffled by the lack of quality software for the types of data annotation workflows that linguists who do elicitation work with native speakers need to do. There's FLEx [0], but it's windows only and really not very good.

    I'd love to build a modern, cross-platform replacement for FLEx. I just need to actually do it.

    [0]: https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/

    [-]
    • idermoth 2 hours ago
      I studied linguistics in college but never used FLEx. Sounds like an interesting project. Why do you say it's not very good (outside being windows only) and what keeps you from starting this project?
  • mtmail 1 day ago
    Seen today "I would dig an app that showed you how many lines of code you committed each day across every Github repo. Is it out there?" https://bsky.app/profile/ianlandsman.com/post/3lilcgtt7nc2c
    [-]
  • morisil 1 day ago
    I am a shader developer, often struggling with the incompatibility of underlying rendering tech (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, etc.). I built my own live-coding visual synthesizer using Kotlin script and OpenGL. If I had some time, I would port it to Google filament, so it is truly multiplatform.
  • frans 21 hours ago
    I wish there was a way to open an MS Office file on my Linux Mint laptop with the real Word or Excel—no emulators that barely work, or office365 and no sluggish Windows VMs. Just a smooth, native experience.
  • nopmat 1 day ago
    An org-mode datetree that toggles between chronological and reverse-chronological order.
  • fullstackwife 18 hours ago
    Jira Viewer - connect to your self hosted Jira database, and view the content, navigate projects, search issues. Open source, modern, scalable, and free.
  • RGamma 1 day ago
    A sane web archiver (SaaS or web apps do not count as sane).