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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#401

Post by rahimnathwani »

loomio wrote: post #377
wting wrote: post #91

There's a lot of parallel conversations on Reddit / HN / etc. for various articles. Would about pulling high rated, top-level conversations from multiple sources for a quick digest? Sort of like Google News for commentary.

As someone who often appreciates the comments as much or more than the content - yes! I often come across articles in places other than Reddit or HN and wish I could do a "reverse lookup" to see where it might have been submitted just so I can read the comments.

There's a Chrome add-on which uses the Algolia API to do this. It adds a pop-out side bar showing the HN comments for the page/article you're currently reading. You must be on the page submitted, rather than on a comments page, though.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#402

Post by spaboleo »

chourobin wrote: post #82
karangoeluw wrote: post #5

Ok I'll go first. It's an "Imgur for audio files". Now there's times when you record an audio and want to share it. What do you do? Uhh,, umm.... Yup. exactly. There's no reliable, easy-to-use app to share audio files (not music). So, this is a web/mobile app for easily uploading and sharing audio files, and playing them. I don't have a full plan laid out, but I'll work on it for sure. (If you'd like to be notified w…

Dropbox share link

The issue with this is the increasing number of people on mobile devices and variety of device types.

Worst case (and sadly most common one): You share the dropbox link, the recipient clicks on it, it opens the browser, triggers a download, he has to choose a download location, download vanishes or takes a few seconds that are spent doing something else, worst case: the person forgets about the file / best case: he digs ups a file manager, navigates to the downloaded file and opens it, player selection...maybe...and all that for a 5-15s just audio-greeting message :/

It should just work out of the box.

People seem to use Messengers for that. Like Whatsapp, which play back recorded or attached Audio. But yet this is only mobile.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#403

Post by scoot »

fest wrote: post #276

Ordering prototype (3d printing, CNC machining, lasercutting) parts, reimagined. It's a major pain just to get a few parts made- first you find a company that does that, e-mail them their design, they get back to you with a quote and you either accept it or go back to step 1. What if you could just upload your design, select a material from catalogue and receive an instant quote. If you're happy with it, order the pa…

eMachineShop is the closest I've seen to a full-service bureau with online design and ordering.

CAD your design, select your material, quantities etc - get real time quotes, refine your spec, and order on the spot.

Not the cheapest for small quantities, but for a small run in production quality / materials, or larger actual production runs, they're excellent.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#404

Post by Spittie »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #114
pubby wrote: post #39

A twitter/imageboard system where it takes 2 weeks for messages to appear once posted. The idea being that messages still relevant in 2 weeks are important and interesting ones.

I had a similar idea a while ago. Basically: a reddit/HN clone, but at any given time only one article can be commented on. That article is replaced every day or every hour (whatever interval makes sense) with the highest-upvoted submission that doesn't have comments yet. The goal would be to encourage deeper discussion of matters, rather than fleeting posts. I have no idea if tree-style comments would be better than…

That's a really nice idea, I'm sure such a site has the potential to generate very high-quality discussions about a topic.

The only problem I see, is that the audience of HN (and Reddit even more) is big and has many different interests. It's very hard to cover those interests with only an article a day, and many might just lose interests after a bunch of days without anything interesting for them. Moving the cadence down would probably help, I think the sweet spot might be around 4/6 articles a day.

I think I'd also try to bring down the number of submissions compared to HN. HN gets a lot of those, and it's good, but I don't think it would be healthy for such a site. I can think off limiting the number of submissions an account can do every day/week, limiting submissions to accounts older than X days (this is mostly to avoid spam) and/or having a pay-for-submission system (not real money, but karma or other similar things).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#405

Post by krishna2 »

yzhou wrote: post #176

Here's what I want: A cheap text ssh terminal with wifi,or cellular, nice keyboard hardware, with extremely long battery life (or solar powered), which i can just throw it in my car and forget it. Whenever I am away of my computer I can always log in to my cloud server and write codes or do some quick fixes.

This should be possible with a Kindle. The basic Kindle costs $50 or so. And it is a fork of Android. And has a month of battery life. There are some Kindle-roots [Search "root a kindle"]. Would something like this work for you? The keyboard will still be the kindle-keyboard.

The other option is a cheap ipad with a bluetooth keyboard. If you turn off all the unnecessary apps and notifications and put it on airplane mode - it should last a couple of weeks. You turn it on only when you need it. You will still need to get an ssh app [many available].

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#406

Post by adamzerner »

Skimmable video. Like this - http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/

Like any platform, there's the chicken-egg problem. I'm not sure how you'd get enough content, but I'm confident that if you had enough content, it'd be better than YouTube.

But starting off getting content wouldn't be that hard though. You could take currently existing YouTube videos and make them skimmable. And you could convince people to make videos for your site because the quality is so high.

And if you could create a tool that makes making these videos easy, it'd provide single-user utility, is important for platforms. See http://platformed.info/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#407

Post by spaboleo »

pnathan wrote: post #216

Chores service. For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore. Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the apartment building is poorly laid out. I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want someone for random h…

Think of this from the viewpoint of changing demographic: People get older and need to taken care of, which is shockingly expensive.

There are several attempts, with prototyped like housing/neighborhood scenarios, where the younger generations (students) live together with the elderly. Older people might live in the ground-level apartments, while the young students wouldn't worry about walking up 2-3 flights of stairs. They could do some shopping, basic housekeeping, watch them take the right medication in the morning. In return the elderly could return the favor by exchanging non-monetary things, like home-made food. Or they could just pay for the students to lower their rent.

All those solutions are great, but they require serious building of infrastructure, which can't be done immediately.

So services like the one described above seem to be an intermediate solution. The problem is that all those "micro-tasks" (take the cleaning the litterbox example) are too easy/short to be paid a sufficient amount of money to be done. It's an entirely different league if you pay a gardener to come to your house twice a week for 3-4 hours. And even gardeners/poolboys etc. have issues if they have to drive from client to client for 30min. or more.

It would be great if there would be a platform that allows people living geographically close together share a qualified person doing specific services. Take someone walking their dogs every morning as an example. The cost can be shared amongst 6-10 dog owners. While the time spent for walking 6-10 dogs might only double (you need time to collect and return them) instead of increasing 6-10 fold.

So the service should bundle and curate requests from a neighborhood or house. If a couple requests are similar, like "I would love someone to clean my windows every X weeks." They get bundled into a service package for which local contractors provide a quote. And other people living in the neighborhood can then pledge for the service. With every new customer joining the average price is lowered for everyone.

Kind of like a curated form of a cross between taskrabbit and kickstarter.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#408

Post by spaboleo »

sarvagyavaish wrote: post #335

Travel Assistant While travelling I like to keep family and friends involved up to date about my travel plans - itinerary changes, delayed flights, boarded flight, landed flight, etc. Instead of a pushing updates by texting 3-4 different people, I want to be able to provide an update in one place, say, on the Travel Assistant app, and my family can receive appropriate updates.

Doesn't www.tripit.com do exactly this?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#409

Post by samsonasu »

busterarm wrote: post #255
avalaunch wrote: post #174

A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home. There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your…

Property management companies take care of this for rental units. Why not just find a good one that operates in your area and pitch the idea to them? Normally they operate for a percentage of rents but I'm sure you could find one who would do it for flat rate. Your problem with the insurance company thing is you might have to give them Power of Attorney (which you really don't want to do) to make insurance claims on…

The problem is that while they charge a flat rate monthly, that doesn't include repairs and one-off charges which get passed on to the landlord. Maybe doing a combination of property management and home warranty would be valuable, but neither industry has the best reputation IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#410

Post by samsonasu »

busterarm wrote: post #255
avalaunch wrote: post #174

A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home. There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your…

Property management companies take care of this for rental units. Why not just find a good one that operates in your area and pitch the idea to them? Normally they operate for a percentage of rents but I'm sure you could find one who would do it for flat rate. Your problem with the insurance company thing is you might have to give them Power of Attorney (which you really don't want to do) to make insurance claims on…

The problem is that while they charge a flat rate monthly, that doesn't include repairs and one-off charges which get passed on to the landlord. Maybe doing a combination of property management and home warranty would be valuable, but neither industry has the best reputation IMO.
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