Ideas Lab
Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works
- Ideas
- 4,134
- BUILD
- 689
- Sources
- 8
- Last sync
- 21h ago
Simplified Framework for Building Server-Side Applications
Developers spend time boilerplating and configuring server infrastructure. A lightweight framework or template system could reduce setup time for common server-side patterns.
YC Graveyard5y agoToolDev
Fragmented data sources create operational friction for teams
Teams waste time syncing data across disconnected systems (CRMs, databases, files, APIs). A unified interface for querying and managing distributed data could unlock productivity.
YC Graveyard5y agoToolDev
Remote Patient Monitoring for Chronic Diseases
Daily telehealth monitoring and management for patients with chronic conditions (COPD, CHF, hypertension)
YC Graveyard7y agoToolMedicine & Health
Low-Cost Autonomous Checkout Stores
Building affordable cashierless retail stores using computer vision for payment processing
YC Graveyard7y agoToolE-Commerce
Discovery and Community for Niche Beauty Communities
Black women struggle to discover hairstyles, find tutorials, and connect with stylists and community around their specific hair needs. Instagram and TikTok are generic; a dedicated space solves discovery and authentic community building.
YC Graveyard9y agoTemplateDesign & Creative
Accessible luxury fashion rental for special occasions
High-end fashion is expensive to own; many people need premium pieces only occasionally (weddings, galas, events). A curated marketplace connecting luxury item owners with renters solves affordability and utilization.
YC Graveyard12y agoTemplateE-Commerce
HR Automation and Employee Experience
Automating HR processes and workflows. This remains a real problem as many companies still struggle with fragmented HR tools, manual processes, and employee engagement.
YC Graveyard17y agoToolHR & Career
Q&A platform for expert answering and community knowledge
Community-driven Q&A platform where users ask questions and receive answers from domain experts, creating searchable knowledge bases.
YC Graveyard16y agoTemplateCommunity
Better email inbox organization and management
Tools to reimagine how users organize, prioritize, and interact with email—reducing inbox overload and improving communication flow.
YC Graveyard16y agoToolProductivity
I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
I built Site Spy after missing a visa appointment slot because a government page changed and I didn’t notice for two weeks.It watches webpages for changes and shows the result like a diff. The part I think HN might find interesting is that it can monitor a specific element on a page, not just the whole page, and it can expose changes as RSS feeds.So instead of tracking an entire noisy page, you can watch just a price, a stock status, a headline, or a specific content block. When it changes, you can inspect the diff, browse the snapshot history, or follow the updates in an RSS reader.It’s a Chrome/Firefox extension plus a web dashboard.Main features:- Element picker for tracking a specific part of a page- Diff view plus full snapshot timeline- RSS feeds per watch, per tag, or across all watches- MCP server for Claude, Cursor, and other AI agents- Browser push, Email, and Telegram notificationsChrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/site-spy/jeapcpanag...Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/site-spy/Docs: https://docs.sitespy.appI’d especially love feedback on two things:- Is RSS actually a useful interface for this, or do most people just want direct alerts?- Does element-level tracking feel meaningfully better than full-page monitoring?
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better
Why I built Skir: https://medium.com/@gepheum/i-spent-15-years-with-protobuf-t...Quick start: npx skir initAll the config lives in one YML file.Website: https://skir.buildGitHub: https://github.com/gepheum/skirWould love feedback especially from teams running mixed-language stacks.
Hacker News6mo agoToolDesign & Creative
Satellite imagery object detection using text prompts
I built a browser-based tool for detecting objects in satellite imagery using vision-language models (VLMs). You draw a polygon on the map and enter a text prompt such as "swimming pools", "oil tanks", or "buses". The system scans the selected area tile-by-tile and returns detections projected back onto the map as GeoJSON.Pipeline: select area and zoom level, split the region into mercantile tiles, run each tile with the prompt through a VLM, convert predicted bounding boxes to geographic coordinates (WGS84), and render the results back on the map.It works reasonably well for distinct structures in a zero-shot setting. occluded objects are still better handled by specialized detectors like YOLO models.There is a public demo and no login required. I am mainly interested in feedback on detection quality, performance tradeoffs between VLMs and specialized detectors, and potential real-world use cases.
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
RunAnywhere (YC W26) – Faster AI Inference on Apple Silicon
Hi HN, we're Sanchit and Shubham (YC W26). We built a fast inference engine for Apple Silicon. LLMs, speech-to-text, text-to-speech – MetalRT beats llama.cpp, Apple's MLX, Ollama, and sherpa-onnx on every modality we tested. Custom Metal shaders, no framework overhead.Also, we've open-sourced RCLI, the fastest end-to-end voice AI pipeline on Apple Silicon. Mic to spoken response, entirely on-device. No cloud, no API keys.To get started: brew tap RunanywhereAI/rcli https://github.com/RunanywhereAI/RCLI.git brew install rcli rcli setup # downloads ~1 GB of models rcli # interactive mode with push-to-talk Or: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RunanywhereAI/RCLI/main/install.sh | bash The numbers (M4 Max, 64 GB, reproducible via `rcli bench`):LLM decode – 1.67x faster than llama.cpp, 1.19x faster than Apple MLX (same model files): - Qwen3-0.6B: 658 tok/s (vs mlx-lm 552, llama.cpp 295) - Qwen3-4B: 186 tok/s (vs mlx-lm 170, llama.cpp 87) - LFM2.5-1.2B: 570 tok/s (vs mlx-lm 509, llama.cpp 372) - Time-to-first-token: 6.6 msSTT – 70 seconds of audio transcribed in *101 ms*. That's 714x real-time. 4.6x faster than mlx-whisper.TTS – 178 ms synthesis. 2.8x faster than mlx-audio and sherpa-onnx.We built this because demoing on-device AI is easy but shipping it is brutal. Voice is the hardest test: you're chaining STT, LLM, and TTS sequentially, and if any stage is slow, the user feels it. Most teams fall back to cloud APIs not because local models are bad, but because local inference infrastructure is.The thing that's hard to solve is latency compounding. In a voice pipeline, you're stacking three models in sequence. If each adds 200ms, you're at 600ms before the user hears a word, and that feels broken. You can't optimize one stage and call it done. Every stage needs to be fast, on one device, with no network round-trip to hide behind
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code
We needed something like --dangerously-skip-permissions that doesn’t nuke your untracked files, exfiltrate your keys, or install malware.Claude Code's permission system is allow-or-deny per tool, but that doesn’t really scale. Deleting some files is fine sometimes. And git checkout is sometimes not fine. Even when you curate permissions, 200 IQ Opus can find a way around it. Maintaining a deny list is a fool's errand.nah is a PreToolUse hook that classifies every tool call by what it actually does, using a deterministic classifier that runs in milliseconds. It maps commands to action types like filesystem_read, package_run, db_write, git_history_rewrite, and applies policies: allow, context (depends on the target), ask, or block.Not everything can be classified, so you can optionally escalate ambiguous stuff to an LLM, but that’s not required. Anything unresolved you can approve, and configure the taxonomy so you don’t get asked again.It works out of the box with sane defaults, no config needed. But you can customize it fully if you want to.No dependencies, stdlib Python, MIT.pip install nah && nah installhttps://github.com/manuelschipper/nah
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included
We are Bailey and Robbie and we are working on Klaus (https://klausai.com/): hosted OpenClaw that is secure and powerful out of the box.Running OpenClaw requires setting up a cloud VM or local container (a pain) or giving OpenClaw root access to your machine (insecure). Many basic integrations (eg Slack, Google Workspace) require you to create your own OAuth app.We make running OpenClaw simple by giving each user their own EC2 instance, preconfigured with keys for OpenRouter, AgentMail, and Orthogonal. And we have OAuth apps to make it easy to integrate with Slack and Google Workspace.We are both HN readers (Bailey has been on here for ~10 years) and we know OpenClaw has serious security concerns. We do a lot to make our users’ instances more secure: we run on a private subnet, automatically update the OpenClaw version our users run, and because you’re on our VM by default the only keys you leak if you get hacked belong to us. Connecting your email is still a risk. The best defense I know of is Opus 4.6 for resilience to prompt injection. If you have a better solution, we’d love to hear it!We learned a lot about infrastructure management in the past month. Kimi K2.5 and Mimimax M2.5 are extremely good at hallucinating new ways to break openclaw.json and otherwise wreaking havoc on an EC2 instance. The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand.We wrote a ton of best practices on using OpenClaw on AWS Linux into our users’ AGENTS.md, got really good at un-bricking EC2 machines over SSM, added a command-and-control server to every instance to facilitate hotfixes and migrations, and set up a Klaus instance to answer FAQs on discord.In addition to all of this, we built ClawBert, our AI SRE for hotfixing OpenClaw instances automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v65F6VBXqKY. Clawbert is a Claude Code instance that runs whenever a health check fails or the user triggers it in the UI. It can read that user’s
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
Open-source browser for AI agents
Hi HN, I forked chromium and built agent-browser-protocol (ABP) after noticing that most browser-agent failures aren’t really about the model misunderstanding the page. Instead, the problem is that the model is reasoning from a stale state.ABP is designed to keep the acting agent synchronized with the browser at every step. After each action (click, type, etc), it freezes JavaScript execution and rendering, then captures the resulting state. It also compiles the notable events that occurred during that action loop, such as navigation, file pickers, permission prompts, alerts, and downloads, and sends that along with a screenshot of the frozen page state back to the agent.The result is that browser interaction starts to feel more like a multimodal chat loop. The agent takes an action, gets back a fresh visual state and a structured summary of what happened, then decides what to do next from there. That fits much better with how LLMs already work.A few common browser-use failures ABP helps eliminate: * A modal appears after the last Playwright screenshot and blocks the input the agent was about to use * Dynamic filters cause the page to reflow between steps * An autocomplete dropdown opens and covers the element the agent intended to click * alert() / confirm() interrupts the flow * Downloads are triggered, but the agent has no reliable way to know when they’ve completedAs proof, ABP with opus 4.6 as the driver scores 90.5% on the Online Mind2Web benchmark. I think modern LLMs already understand websites, they just need a better tool to interact with them. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, forking chrome or anything else in the comments below.Try it out: `claude mcp add browser -- npx -y agent-browser-protocol --mcp` (Codex/OpenCode instructions in the docs)Demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/387f6349196f417d8b4b16a5452c3369
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
Prism (YC X25) – Workspace and API to generate and edit videos
Hey HN — we’re Rajit, Land, and Alex. We’re building Prism (https://www.prismvideos.com), an AI video creation platform and API.Here’s a quick demo of how you can remix any video with Prism: https://youtu.be/0eez_2DnayIHere’s a quick demo of how you can automate UGC-style ads with Openclaw + Prism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dWaD23qnroAccompanying skill.md file: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lIskVljW1OqbkXFyXeLHRsfM...Making an AI video today usually means stitching together a dozen tools (image generation, image-to-video, upscalers, lip-sync, voiceover, and an editor). Every step turns into export/import and file juggling, so assets end up scattered across tabs and local storage, and iterating on a multi-scene video is slow.Prism keeps the workflow in one place: you generate assets (images/video clips) and assemble them directly in a timeline editor without downloading files between tools. Practically, that means you can try different models (Kling, Veo, Sora, Hailuo, etc) and settings for a single clip, swap it on the timeline, and keep iterating without re-exporting and rebuilding the edit elsewhere.We also support templates and one-click asset recreation, so you can reuse workflows from us or the community instead of rebuilding each asset from scratch. Those templates are exposed through our API, letting your AI agents discover templates in our catalog, supply the required inputs, and generate videos in a repeatable way without manually stitching the workflow together.We built Prism because we were making AI videos ourselves and were unsatisfied with the available tools. We kept losing time to repetitive “glue work” such as constantly downloading files, keeping track of prompts/versions, and stitching clips in a separate video editing software. We’re trying to make the boring parts of multi-step AI video creation less manual so users can generate → review → edit → assembl
Hacker News6mo agoToolAI
No simple way to block all verified profiles on X/Twitter
Users are annoyed by verified accounts and would pay for a feature or tool that automatically blocks all verified profiles to curate their feed.
X6mo agoToolMedia