Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's your problem?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 51 posts

Ask HN: What's your problem?

#1

Post by kez »

In the spirit of identifying niches that HNers could develop products and services around, I'd like to ask what your problems are.

I'm guessing the majority of readers here are not self-employed or actively working on startups, and most niche-identifying-problems stem from the work place. I'll start...

I want to be able to scribe meeting notes and have them recorded digitally for circulation to colleagues and CRM systems. This could take the form of a printed note-taking template, where by OCR could determine different sections (attendees, date, actions, notes) when scanning them in. It is not good etiquette (here) to scribe notes on a laptop during a meeting, and typing them up by hand is very time consuming.

What are your problems?

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#2

Post by drcode »

I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required for this:

   - Buying a Mac dev box
   - Learning Objective C
   - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#3

Post by hvs »

drcode wrote: post #2

I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required for this: - Buying a Mac dev box - Learning Objective C - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

Objective C isn't really that hard if you already know C. I find it a lot more pleasant to use than, say, C++.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#4

Post by bmelton »

Failure to finish. I've had, to date, 7 ideas that, had I finished executing, I would have been first to market (in most cases, by years). I would have been beaten to market on one other product, and really close to tied with another few.

In imaginary-land, where I live, of the 7 companies I beat to market, 4 of them had million dollar + exits or acquisitions, so I COULD have been worth 45-55 million, give or take.

My number one challenge in doing anything is not having somebody else to motivate me, or even just tell me what to do. With almost everything I do, I solve the challenges first; the bits that otherwise make the product, or the bits that aren't obviously going to work... once I've built those out, the project is mentally done for me.

I will often fail to do the little things, the EASY things even, like building the change password page, or sending an email for account creation, etc. I'm so bad at it, even, that I will often stop after I have figured out HOW to solve the problems, without ever even bothering to actually implement.

So yeah, that's why I'm stuck with my 9-to-5. Good question.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#5

Post by mstevens »

I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always feel like email clients just aren't up to it.

I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#6

Post by scorchin »

mstevens wrote: post #5

I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always feel like email clients just aren't up to it. I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

You're not the only one: http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init

Looks as though the project is going to be called 'Letters App' and the president is John Gruber.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#7

Post by scorchin »

drcode wrote: post #2

I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required for this: - Buying a Mac dev box - Learning Objective C - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

I'm going through the same process right now.

I've just bought a Mac Mini + Magic Mouse + VGA Adapter + AppleCare for £700. I've got a decent monitor, KVM switch and keyboard already.

I'm going over my K&R book at the moment, running through all of the exercises — especially pointers.

Once I've finishes with K&R my plan is to go through 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Hillegass. Aiming for a completion date around the end of March. After that my iPhone development begins as I should have a decent foothold over core Mac programming and will, hopefully, only need to fill in a few blanks using the online references.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#8

Post by arihelgason »

Problems faced by the denizens of this site are more likely to be well-served by what already exists.

Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world. That's where you find the big, underserved problems.

Re: Ask HN: What's your problem?

#9

Post by mstevens »

scorchin wrote: post #6
mstevens wrote: post #5

I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always feel like email clients just aren't up to it. I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

You're not the only one: http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init Looks as though the project is going to be called 'Letters App' and the president is John Gruber.

Interesting. Looks more mac specific than I was thinking.

My musings on interesting areas:

* I don't care about IMAP/POP/all that stuff. Mail comes in via SMTP, goes out via SMTP.

* Messages go straight into postgres

* There's gold in them thar messages headers - there's a lot of structure hidden in there that gets ignored, it must be possible to do something interesting.

* GTD motivated one-message-at-a-time, file/reply/mark to reply later.

* There must be something interesting you can do with automatic email classification.

* Only client is webmail.

* Unashamed focus on people who need to manage 500 messages a day.

Post reply on HN