The best use for HalfBakery.com in my experience, is as Snopes for Ideas.

If someone guardedly shares their own half-baked idea over dinner (especially if they think they need to find a technical partner, investor, or get a patent), rather than give them a lecture about customer development, I tell them it sounds interesting and send them a link to Half-Bakery or http://www.cambrianhouse.com/idea/.

The hit rate is shockingly high. And even if they don't find their idea, they'll realize ideas are a dime a dozen and start focusing on how to validate whether their idea actually has legs.

edit: there->their

A great site and I'm glad to see it's still going (although apparently it kind of died - and was revived - in 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfbakery)

I had several (ridiculous) ideas while I was an undergrad and I remember how pleased I was when I found other folks had posted similar ideas on Half-Bakery. In fact one idea actually did end up on supermarket shelves (albeit in a different form).

You know you've been on the Internet too long when sites you visited a decade ago pop up here as news.

It's not news, HN has only ever been about 50% news, the other half are just interesting links.

Sure, i get annoyed every time the 500-mile email or more magic or some other classic story gets reposted, but that's what HN is about-- every time it's reposted, there are dozens of people that hadn't seen it before.

The cycle of life, or school as it may be. You have the freshmen, then come your sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Of course the freshmen are going to be immature. Yes, and the sophomores are going to be struggling to identify with something; new web fads. Juniors and seniors then become old people, "get off my lawn" type. But there is no real way to sort out the cruft. We are all in the same "class"(internet). I like to think of repost as re-education.

I remember this site from the beginning of the Internet - nice to see it still going!

An excellent web site! I first came across it when the topic of my PhD thesis was noted as a half-baked idea! (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/gait_20recognition).

If I remember correctly, the Chinese have a product that uses this. It's built into floor tiles.

Would it be easily fooled with silly walking like smiling does for facial recognition?

Signal to noise ratio makes these sites hard to take seriously or to put in any time to read through the submissions.

I don't think it's meant to be taken that seriously. Hence calling it 'Half-Baked'.

this is what I visit www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis for :)