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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
491–500 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#492Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#493A single IM platform through which everyone can talk to everyone regardless of their IM service, and I mean I wanna be able to send a message to someone's iMessage from my Battle.net account, and then receive someone's Facebook message on my Slack or something. Obviously IDK how this would be possible, but IM is now broken beyond repair by companies that tried to "fix" it. The list of IM apps on my iPhone keeps growi…
What happens when you send a message? Does it spam to all platforms? Does everyone have to declare a preferred app to receive? Does it check your previous communication with that contact to see which platform has the best response rate? Just asking, it doesnt seem like it would be that difficult. In fact im sure this used to exist when it was just msn, icq etc.
I would imagine that, quite like Email, you have a universally recognizable IM handle that you can use with any service.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#494Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#495Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#496An operating system with an interface that's a substantial improvement over POSIX. I'd like to see statically typed files and pipes, and a built-in file conversion solver so that if I have, say, a postscript file and I want it in pdf format, I can just tell the OS to use any conversion utility with a matching type signature and I don't have to remember what it's called. I'd like a process/thread to be able to have mu…
My item added to that would be this, "There's a universal dedicated storage mechanism for the state of the operating system and its related packages similar to a SQL database." It really annoys me how ad-hoc state and values are treated in an operating system with ASCII config files. You can always have means of human-friendliness even if the underlying data is more strictly structured such as in a database but you c…
WinFS tried and failed to do something similar.
>Each package invents their own config language and forces it down your throat.
Windows Registry.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd like to see statically typed files and pipes You mean homogeneous files and pipes - only text, only numbers, etc - that kind of nonsense? Static typing falls apart with heterogeneous containers. Or you are just putting that static typing everywhere because it is so cool - typescript, huh huh?
The idea of types is a little different for files than it would be in a programming language. In a sense, all files are trivially of type [Char], but that's not really what I mean. If program A emits XML on stdout, and program B accepts JSON on stdin, "A | B" should be rejected by the shell. A related feature that might be useful is to be able to register checkers or filters for any file type so that if, say, same ap…
For media files you would be able to achieve something similar with FUSE and FFMPEG.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#498A slim, networked, pocked sized computer with a physical keyboard, running android or Linux. These used to exist - albeit disguised as phones - but the marketing department decided we don't need no friggin keyboards, and remove everything but the touchscreen and call it a tablet. The result is a consume-only device, on which it is all but impossible to input large amounts of text. Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 3/4, HTC…
Like the pyra/pandora? https://pyra-handheld.com/
I like the idea, but they talk about the future while the website is designed like it's still 1997.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML+CSS+JS being the "assembly language of the web" is a terrible build target, I want a better foundation to build upon.
I think you're massively overstating how bad HTML+CSS+JS are, but how do you feel about WebAsm + WebGL as the target?
I'd like to keep the DOM around and not have the web turn into an incomprehensible mess of canvas pixels.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I have been trying a hobby-dev project that is kinda along these lines but I am almost on the verge of giving up. The problem is, the feed/stream API endpoints for most of the services mentioned above, either do not exist or have been removed. - FB and Instagram no longer provide them, for sure. - WhatsApp doesn't have an official API - the last time I test-drove Yowsup, my number was 'blocked' by WhatsApp. - N…
Well yeah, screen scraping would be required. The core of the product would have to be a screen scraping engine that makes it easy to build screen scrapers fast. You'd also have to commit to daily updates of all the various screen scrapers to keep them working. Without that it would fail. Perhaps a machine learning approach could work.
You could be a little bit more adversarial in the approach. Create several accounts, have them each message one another. Since you know the message and can use OCR, you can easily automate compensation for changes in the UI.