Ideas Lab
Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works
- Ideas
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- 15h ago
Rudus (YC P26) – AI for concrete contractors
Hi HN, we’re Rishi and Sahil. We’ve developed Rudus (https://www.rudus.ai/), an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform built for concrete subcontractors.Takeoff is the process of measuring and quantifying materials from concrete plan sheets. Rudus identifies every concrete structure (footings, walls, columns, slabs), pulls in related details, and eliminates hours of manual quantity calculation. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAMNDRWEdlI.The problem: Concrete subcontractors are the backbone of every building, but their estimating workflow hasn't changed in 20 years. Right now, a senior estimator opens a PDF, manually traces every footing and grade beam, then hand-builds an Excel spreadsheet with 300+ line items- volumes, formwork, rebar by bar size with lap splices and development lengths. Bids can take weeks and even months. Most firms have just a few estimators, meaning they physically cannot bid on most of the work available to them.The software incumbent in this trade hasn’t been updated since 2020. Beyond that, every AI takeoff tool on the market was built for GCs and treats concrete as one checkbox, rather than working around how concrete estimators actually price work. We’re building Rudus for this trade and only this trade.We started this when Sahil took a construction management class and realized how the estimation workflows hadn't changed in decades. We started cold calling, walking into offices with donuts, showing up at job sites, and everyone told us the same thing: slow estimation is the biggest bottleneck in growing their business, but every new product they've tried has failed. We quickly realized that the reason those tools failed is a lack of trust and frequent errors causing later problems. Estimators stake million to billion dollar bids on these numbers, and they are clear that they won’t trade their workflow for a black box. We took a different approach: software that intelligently
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Textile – A desktop app for weaving together bits of text
Hi all,I'm excited to show off Textile, a desktop app I recently built.Textile can combine bits of text using various inputs, such as commands on your computer, the contents of your clipboard, and hard-coded strings that you provide. It lets you carefully build up and modify a dynamic string, step by step, until it's exactly how you need it. The saved steps can then be executed on demand, with the click of a button or using a keyboard shortcut.I built Textile because I was often constructing complicated, dynamic URLs from various sources that all existed on my computer. I got tired of manually switching between different apps, copying and pasting various chunks of text, and assembling them all together somewhere. I've also found Textile to be quite useful as a kind of repository for obscure bits of static text, such as ½ and other fraction characters, when I can't be bothered to remember their built-in keyboard combinations.I also built Textile because I wanted to learn Electron, although I expect there will be some gnashing of teeth about this here. :) I think desktop development is quite interesting, in part because it doesn't require me, the developer, to pay for an API server and database in the cloud. The app itself is both the UI and the "server," and the local drive is effectively the "database." I knows this trades away syncing with the cloud but, on the other hand, there's something nice about knowing that your files are on your drive and not on somebody else's server.I realize that something like Textile may already exist, and may have much more functionality but, again, I wanted to learn. I must say that multi-sequence keyboard shortcuts are hard, and there are cases that don't work right in Textile. I feel vulnerable admitting that my approach has much room for improvement!For what it's worth, I did not use an LLM to write any code for Textile (although I did ask many questions of an LLM, a
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Open-Source AI Racing Harness
Hi I'm Dan from Elodin, making an open source real-time capable flight software simulation.For AI Grand Prix contestants, the wait for the Round 1 virtual qualifier simulation has been grueling.If you’re competing, check out our simulation harness to tide you over, built to match the published competition constraints and message format. It runs against real Betaflight, which we learned requires at least 1000 sensor samples per second to run real-time correctly.The competition warranted introducing a new feature to generate the camera sensor directly in the simulation loop. Typically people connect to Unreal or similar game engine to create a camera sensor, which works well but is very heavy. For the simple needs of this challenge, creating sample directly in the loop is very handy and easy to use. Happy to hear your feedback on this! While it's not fancy looking currently, it uses the Rust Bevy game engine, which should allow us to improve the visual fidelity quickly.We all should easily be able to shift our implementation to the published competition sim once it lands. Hope you enjoy and good luck!
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Breathe CLI – Paced resonance breathing in the macOS terminal
I built a terminal app that paces slow breathing at 6 breaths per minute for vagal tone training. It's a single Python file, stdlib only, no dependencies — just run breathe and follow the bar.I'm a cardiology patient (HFrEF). Slow breathing at resonance frequency is one of the few non-pharmacological interventions shown to improve cardiac vagal tone and baroreflex sensitivity (Bernardi et al., Circulation 2002; Lancet 1998). I wanted a frictionless daily habit tool — no app store, no account, no subscription, just open terminal and go.Design constraints, all grounded in the clinical literature:- No breath retention — Valsalva risk in cardiac patients- No rapid breathing — minimum 8-second cycles- Exhale ≤ 2x inhale — no evidence for extreme ratios- Immediate exit, always — q or Ctrl+C restores the terminal even on crashThe README includes a resonance frequency measurement protocol for anyone with a chest-strap HRV monitor who wants to find their individual optimum instead of using the 6 bpm default.macOS only (uses afplay for audio cues). MIT licensed.pip install breathe-cliorbrew tap marekkowalczyk/breathe && brew install breathe.
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Custom content blocking for specific public figures on mobile
Users need a phone tool to effectively block all content involving certain individuals (e.g., influencers) that persists despite standard filters.
X3mo agoToolProductivity
Need for quiet gyms without loud music
People are frustrated with loud music in gyms and would pay for a silent or music-free gym experience in their area.
X3mo agoOtherSport & Fitness
Data Breach Notification & Exposure Tracker
Help individuals track if their personal data was exposed in public breaches (like Carnival's 6M record leak). Aggregates breach notifications and allows users to check exposure across incidents. [Trending: "carnival corporation data breach" with 500+ searches in GB]
Google Trends3mo agoToolBusinessGB
Video-based discussion platform for current events
Users want to engage in real-time video conversations about news and current events with context and community participation
YC Graveyard9y agoToolMedia & News
Expanse (YC P26) – Unlock Wasted GPU Capacity
Hey HN, we’re Ismaeel, Eren, Yafet and Nikodem. We built Expanse (https://expanse.sh/) to increase the effective capacity of your HPC/GPU clusters running schedulers/orchestrators like Kubernetes and SLURM. We read the source code, job submission script, and the hardware a workload is about to run on to predict what the job actually needs before the cluster sees it. We also flag failures we think are about to happen and surface line-level optimisations the researcher can apply themselves.The problem: Datacenters run at roughly 30% to 40% effective utilisation. Users request more resources than what they actually need, because of asymmetric risk: while over-requesting is bad because it’s expensive and wastes capacity that someone else could have used, under-requesting kills your job mid-run and you lose days of work. So everyone over-requests by two to three times.We measured one national-scale HPC cluster for a month and from 122k jobs, 59% of the compute was wasted. At on-demand cloud rates for the same hardware, that’s roughly $8.5M of compute wasted in one month on one cluster. The pattern is similar in large scale compute industries as well, such as quant funds, AI labs, and manufacturing.The four of us ran HPC and GPU training workloads at the largest quant funds and HPC facilities. Ismaeel did research at EPCC (Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre, the UK’s national HPC site) under Adrian Jackson, where he built the first multimodal HPC resource predictor: a model that ingests job source code, submission scripts, hardware telemetry and cluster metadata in order to figure out how much compute will actually be needed. On a dataset of real workloads on EPCC’s own clusters it scored 34% better than any other baseline, and outperformed frontier general-purpose LLMs prompted on the same prediction task by roughly 8x. These results convinced us the problem was solvable with software.Expanse installs on every node and hooks into SLURM (or the
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Open Envelope – an open schema for defining AI agent teams
Built an open JSON Schema for defining AI agent teams.Multi-agent systems are becoming a real deployment pattern — not single assistants, but teams with roles, handoffs, and human checkpoints. But there's no shared way to define one that travels across frameworks. Every implementation is scattered, locked to whichever tool you picked first. Built the schema to fix that.The schema lives at schema.openenvelope.org and is registered in SchemaStore, so if you drop a .envelope.json file in VS Code you get autocomplete and validation without installing anything. It's also on npm as @openenvelope/schema if you want to validate programmatically.The spec covers: agent definitions (role, prompt, model, access policy), supervisor/sub-agent hierarchy, human-in-the-loop gates, pipelines, schedules, and secrets/variables that get injected at deploy time. Access policies let you declare exactly which hosts each agent can call — the runtime enforces this at the network level, not in the prompt.The goal is a portable definition format — define a team once, any compatible runtime can execute it. Similar to how Dockerfiles describe a container without being tied to a specific host. There's a managed runtime at openenvelope.org but the schema is Apache 2.0 and anyone can implement it.Happy to answer questions on any part of the spec — especially interested in feedback from people who've built multi-agent systems and have opinions on what's missing.
Hacker News3mo agoToolAI
Lost revenue from 20-40% of Stripe payments that fail silently
Businesses using Stripe lose significant revenue because failed payments churn without recovery, requiring manual intervention or dedicated tools to automatically retry and recover them.
X3mo agoToolFinance
Prolonged toilet time causes preventable pain and health issues
People doomscroll on the toilet for too long, leading to physical pain like hemorrhoids; they need a simple timer to enforce shorter sessions.
X3mo agoToolMedicine & Health
Indie builders get traffic but poor landing page conversions
Builders ship products and drive traffic but struggle to convert visitors into signups because they can't identify specific conversion leaks on their landing pages.
X3mo agoToolMarketing & Sales
Early-stage startups launch into silence with no attention or feedback
Indie founders and early startups launch products but receive zero attention, votes, or constructive critiques, making it hard to gain traction and validation.
X3mo agoToolVC & Startups
Difficulty reliably checking web product elements like social previews and critical page flows without code
Product teams frequently encounter issues verifying social media previews and ensuring important website pages and flows work correctly without writing code, leading to deployment errors and manual testing overhead.
X3mo agoToolDev
Lack of easy, private on-device AI tools for note-taking and transcription
Users need AI-powered tools for meetings and notes that operate entirely locally on Mac without internet or cloud dependency to maintain privacy and offline functionality.
X3mo agoToolProductivity
High costs and complexity of juggling multiple SaaS tools for small teams
Small teams pay hundreds of euros monthly across separate tools for project management, forms, PDFs, etc., seeking a single affordable, EU-hosted alternative that bundles everything.
X3mo agoToolBusiness
STEAM Curriculum Planning & Resource Hub
Schools struggle to design cohesive STEAM programs and locate quality teaching resources. A platform aggregating lesson plans, supplier directories, and budget templates could help educators build programs faster. [Trending: "steam education" with 200+ searches in US]
Google Trends3mo agoToolEducationUS
Criminal Defense Case Management System
Criminal defense lawyers manage complex case documentation, deadlines, and evidence across fragmented tools. A specialized case management platform with evidence tracking and deadline alerts could streamline workflows. [Trending: "criminal defense lawyer" with 200+ searches in US]
Google Trends3mo agoToolLegalUS
Government Benefit Application Simplifier
Complex government benefit forms (10+ pages) create barriers to eligible applicants. A tool that breaks forms into simple step-by-step flows, pre-fills fields, and guides users could increase completion rates. [Trending: "annapurna bhandar online apply" with 2000+ searches in IN]
Google Trends3mo agoToolOtherIN