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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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281–290 of 535 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#282

1) More high quality news analysis content. Think NASA Earth Observatory, The Information, or the best articles you've ever read, and put them behind a paywall. Consistently making top notch content is hard, but I suspect it can be easier if writers are paid good wages to explore their interests and the news industry decouples itself from advertising. I'd pay for it, and I suspect that over time, enough people would.…

I am working on #2. There has to be some sort of incentive for the mentors for this to be sustainable. As a mentee what can you provide to the mentor? What do you think will make this relationship be sustainable?

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#284

1) More high quality news analysis content. Think NASA Earth Observatory, The Information, or the best articles you've ever read, and put them behind a paywall. Consistently making top notch content is hard, but I suspect it can be easier if writers are paid good wages to explore their interests and the news industry decouples itself from advertising. I'd pay for it, and I suspect that over time, enough people would.…

I have a very similar experience with #3. I feel like so much about care for chronic injuries is super sub-optimal.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#285

I would like a vi for spreadsheets. It should run in the terminal, and be able to read/save csv/xls/xlsx/ods files. It should understand formulas. I should let me navigate with vi-style keys, and have a separate mode for editing a cell's contents (with escape to go back to navigation mode). It should perform well even for very large documents (many rows or many columns, but especially many rows). I propose that it be…

Like this? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699

I gave up on sc when I realised there is no npv function that accept a cell range as cash flow input. I also wish it supports having different sheets per document.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#286
post #194

A way to use Mechanical Turk from outside the US. I've needed it with every client I ever worked with, and I need it now and know a dozen companies who do. CrowdFlower has a de facto monopoly on the outside of the US supply and charges an enormous premium for it - enough to turn off most of them. I certainly don't want to pay several thousand a month for the right to submit jobs, although I was ok with the 25% premiu…

I've used Fancy Hands (https://www.fancyhands.com/) before and had good results with it, though it's probably not really price-competitive with MT; I paid about $15 for a quite large amount of scraping work that would've been annoying to write software to do.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#287
post #165

A thin, laptop friendly, RJ45 replacement. Wifi sucks...

or, better wifi...

I am pretty happy with 802.11ac. It's the first time ever I don't bother with wired ethernet on my laptop.

I still have to carry with me ethernet cables and dongles (since I use a Macbook without an Ethernet port), but when I find 802.11ac I don't use them. I hope one day it will be ubiquitous so I don't have to carry all that crap.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#288

An operating system which is a mix of OSX UI, Linux flexibility, FreeBSD network stack, and OpenBSD security. It doesn't need NetBSD compatibility nor anything from Windows. :)

Would you pay for it?

I would absolutely pay for it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#289
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or, better wifi...

I am pretty happy with 802.11ac. It's the first time ever I don't bother with wired ethernet on my laptop. I still have to carry with me ethernet cables and dongles (since I use a Macbook without an Ethernet port), but when I find 802.11ac I don't use them. I hope one day it will be ubiquitous so I don't have to carry all that crap.

It depends on people's needs. Transfering a 4GB file over wifi is pretty painful. Transfering a 50GB VM... forget about it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#290
post #179

An automated ironing appliance. Drop unsorted clothes in, they come out ironed on the other side.

I just put my clothes in the tumble drier, and they come out pretty sharp. Not possible for all types of clothing, but for pants and shirts it works a treat.

I didn't believe this until I tried a dryer in the US.

Here in Europe all the dryers I've seen wrinkle so bad they are unusable for anything but underwear. But in the US I've see several instances of these magical dryer that don't wrinkle clothes.

I don't know what is the secret formula of american dryers and why can't they be found in Europe too.

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