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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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

#31

Post by extrapickles »

ge96 wrote: post #16
swalsh wrote: post #5

I have a backup cam on my car, I want a little wiper on it, like my windshield. Every time it rains I have to get out of my car and wipe it off with my thumb.

Build it, Arduino micro, servo, Bluetooth module. What about the battery though.

Can do something even simpler for cars with rear window wipers.

Take bike brake line, attach one end to the rear window wiper, and route the other end down to where the camera is and use that motion to run smaller wiper over the camera lens. Probably set you back For cars without it, use a 555 timer in one-shot configuration+mosfet/relay to drive a small 12v DC motor that is all powered off the reversing lights, so it automatically does 1 wipe every time you shift to reverse. If you didn't want the wiper to spin 360, you can adjust the pulse width of the 555 and use a spring to return. This would also cost about $10.

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

#32

Post by no_protocol »

sssilver wrote: post #30

A 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…

matrix.org is trying to do this, but so far progress seems slow/incomplete so far. No comment on the technical aspects of it, but the idea of my own server where I can run bridges to all these different accounts is pretty appealing. If all these bridges were actually available, I would be on it all the time.

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

#34

Post by andrewstuart2 »

swalsh wrote: post #5

I have a backup cam on my car, I want a little wiper on it, like my windshield. Every time it rains I have to get out of my car and wipe it off with my thumb.

I wonder if there's any hydrophobic coating you could spray on yourself without turning everything into a hazy or prismy mess.

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

#35

Post by lj3 »

basch wrote: post #10

a news aggregator that works. one where each person using it fills it with all sorts of metadata regarding why they liked/disliked a post/comment/embed etc, and then lets me use all the tagged metadata around content to sort it, possibly with some AI to help me. slashdot seemed like it was on the right track, then the simplicity of the like/upvote threw complex out the window. buzzfeed came back with wtf/lol, but its…

I don't think the complexity of the voting system had a huge impact on why Slashdot waned in popularity. That said, I can see a simpler system where it asks you why you upvoted or downvoted and provides multiple pre-set "reasons" for you to click on.

The problem is using those responses to find something you want to read. Tastes and interests change over time. You might be obsessed with electric cars for a month, then want to read anything but electric cars the next month.

That's the problem with using past data in this case; it's not a great predictor of the future. Social sharing of information from actual people is better and we already have lots of that. So what's missing? Why do we feel news "aggregators" like Twitter and facebook aren't good enough?

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

#36

Post by sssilver »

sssilver wrote: post #30

A 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…

I guess some of the semantics I've mentioned in my comment were wrong. I don't care about Battle.net, Facebook and Slack. All I want is to open ONE IM app, enter friend's name, send them a message, and receive message from them in the same place. And I don't want to know who's on Facebook and who's on Yahoo Messenger. I don't even wanna see those icons next to people's names or anything. And I want it to have a web client. And amazing search. There goes your billion dollar company.

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

#39

Post by psadauskas »

A stack for building web applications in the browser. HTML and CSS are pretty good for documents, but terrible for in-browser GUI apps that we're all building, its just piles of hacks upon hacks.

I want someone, probably Google since they own both a major browser and some of the most popular web applications, to re-invent the entire stack. Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits, like QML, Swift, AppKit, etc. Lets pull in a superior scripting language like Lua and widget-layout framework like Qt, and support it natively and securely in the browser, building on everything we've learned in the last 20 years of creating web applications.

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

#40

Post by asimuvPR »

sssilver wrote: post #30

A 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…

A friend recently started working for a company that builds the app pairade. It supposedly does that. Maybe you should check it out.

Disclaimer: I have never used it.

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