Ideas Lab
Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works
- Ideas
- 4,145
- BUILD
- 689
- Sources
- 8
- Last sync
- 4h ago
Blockchain transaction signing apps force terrible UX or security risks
Developers building games, loyalty platforms, and automated payment apps on blockchain must either require users to manually sign every transaction (terrible UX) or hold keys insecurely, blocking great product shipping.
X3mo agoToolDev
AI-powered personal medical data analysis for diagnostics
Patients need an automated system that ingests medical records, labs, and symptoms to generate diagnostic plans and doctor requests.
X3mo agoToolMedicine & Health
Automated Investment Portfolio Management
Help users automate investment strategies and portfolio rebalancing across brokerages like Schwab without manual trading. Many investors struggle with consistent execution of investment plans. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolFinanceUS
Google Docs Change Tracking & Audit Tool
Visual change tracking and audit logs for Google Docs with role-based access controls. Teams need better visibility into who changed what and when for compliance and collaboration. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolProductivityUS
Email scheduler for Outlook users
Outlook lacks native email scheduling on all platforms. Users frustratedly search for this basic feature, creating demand for third-party schedulers that integrate with Outlook/Microsoft ecosystem. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolProductivityUS
Difficulty finding niche live streams like Indian construction sites
People interested in watching live construction activity in India have no dedicated service or platform for accessing such niche real-time video streams.
X3mo agoToolMedia
No car cleaning services available at EV charging stations
EV owners want to clean their vehicles while charging but current supercharging stations lack vacuums, supplies, or cleaning services, forcing separate trips or dirty cars.
X4mo agoOtherTransportation
No easy way to filter social media replies by country of origin
Users receive unwanted or spam replies from specific countries on platforms like X and want tools to automatically filter or block based on location to reduce noise.
X3mo agoToolMedia
No easy way to search and navigate own tweets by specific date on X
Users struggle to find and filter their own old tweets by exact dates without manual scrolling, making it hard to retrieve specific past posts quickly.
X3mo agoToolProductivity
No dedicated TV show tracking and cataloging app like Letterboxd
Users want a simple app to track, rate, and catalog finished TV shows with social features, similar to how Letterboxd works for movies, but no such dedicated tool exists.
X3mo agoToolMedia
No app to catalog, match, and value vinyl record collections
Vinyl collectors lack a tool to photograph records, identify pressings, estimate values, and manage their collection digitally, unlike existing apps for sports cards.
X3mo agoToolRetail
Lack of exclusive fan app for Patrick Stump
Fans want a dedicated, ad-free space to follow and interact with Patrick Stump's content without noise from other users or platforms.
X3mo agoToolMedia
Lightweight office suite alternative
Users seeking lightweight, open source office alternatives face fragmentation. A simple, modern web-based document/sheet tool could serve budget-conscious teams and offline-first users. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolProductivityUS
PDF editor without Adobe licensing cost
Many open source PDF tools are fragmented or lack key features. A streamlined, modern web-based PDF editor with annotation, form filling, and basic editing could serve users avoiding Adobe's expensive subscriptions. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolProductivityUS
Lightweight project management for small teams
Jira is complex and expensive for small teams. A simple, intuitive project tracking tool with kanban boards and basic automation could serve freelancers and small agencies avoiding heavyweight PM tools. [Google Search suggestion]
Google Trends3mo agoToolProductivityUS
Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
Hey HN! I'm Zach from Adam (https://adam.new/). We're building AI agents for mechanical CAD software. We’ve built the company on two fundamental beliefs:- AI will be the primary medium for creating mechanical designs just like it is in software today.- The best paradigm for CAD generation is to generate CAD as code (text -> code -> CAD).We’re building CADAM, an open source Text to CAD platform. It's a React app (TanStack Start) with a Supabase backend for auth, database, and file storage. Think of it like AI TinkerCAD.Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESOr7EGWqk Try it: https://adam.new/cadam/What it does:- Generates parametric 3D models from natural language, with support for both text prompts and image references.- Outputs OpenSCAD code with automatically extracted parameters that surface as interactive sliders for instant dimension tweaking- Exports as .STL or .SCAD (plus OBJ, GLB/GLTF, FBX, and DXF)Under the hood:- One agentic endpoint with two modes that swap system prompts and tools: a parametric mode that writes/edits OpenSCAD via a build_parametric_model tool, and a mesh mode that generates 3D textured meshes.- Simple parameter tweaks bypass the model entirely; adjusting a slider does a deterministic regex update on the SCAD source, requiring no LLM call.- Model-agnostic via the Vercel AI SDK: Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), and OpenAI/others through OpenRouter, with adaptive thinking auto-enabled on newer models. Surprisingly, in our evals Gemini 3.1 Pro is the top model.- Runs fully in-browser by compiling OpenSCAD to WebAssembly (in a Web Worker, so the UI never blocks) and rendering with Three.js via React Three Fiber- Supports BOSL, BOSL2, and MCAD libraries, plus custom font support (Geist) for text in modelsFuture improvements:- Support both build123d and CadQuery. This will allow us to move beyond CSG primitives to constraint-driven modeling and provide di
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?
After ten years I’m working on a redesign of my personal tech blog. I want to look at some other blogs with good modern design. Of course searching for ‘well designed blogs’ or ‘webdesign 2026’ brings up endless marketing listicles. Even after wading through the crap, the advice is focused on advertising and product centric sites, not prose heavy sites with good typography.So my question to you is: What are some of your favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?I don’t mean the content (though that helps too), but rather sites where the actual experience of reading is pleasant. Think: good fonts, sticky headers (or not), well formatted code snippets, and responsive images. Slide in navbars vs inline table of contents.Thanks, - j
Hacker News3mo agoToolDev
How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?
Before agentic coding, I always prided myself on how long I could work in a flow state. I was really good at working deeply.Now, with slow agents like Claude, I find myself no longer working deeply.What are you all doing to stay focused?
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/ and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress).There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for specific regions, Trismegistos https://www.trismegistos.org/ and Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire (LIRE) https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/latin-inscriptions... are two major efforts I found. But there doesn't seem to be a project that did what I set out to do, although I have read in some places that it was believed to be possible.I am not a classicist or a web developer, but I have Claude and Gemini and I can sort of read basic Latin - so I set to work. I used LIRE and another database as ground truth and built a pipeline to extract and process the inscriptions to recover the names. The process I developed uses a high end LLM like Sonnet or Gemini Pro to supervise the extraction and tuning process on a regional basis until the obvious error rate is reasonable. For this, so far, reasonable to me means less than 1-2% in the smaller initial samples of 100-500 and no observed systemic issues. The different regions often need different prompts, so this basically became an exercise in letting the higher level AI tune the prompt for the lower level AI. The extraction when measured against LIRE produces an F1 score between 0.64 and 0.87, but take this with a grain of salt.Once I had done a few regions, I wanted to see the work, so I threw together a pretty crude website but as I am not a web developer, it was crude in how it
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI