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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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241–250 of 535 posts

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

#241
A platform to connect information / stories / images / video / audio to locations. There are thousands of small, mostly subsidized one-off projects but no general platform for everyone to upload material connected to places and create, say, a personal guided tour of their hometown.

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

#242

A non-cloud off-site backup appliance. This is what I want (I know there are alternatives, but this is what I want): A device that I buy, and can plug at least one hard drive in to. I give it some sort of passphrase. I then place it in a friend's house and connect it to their internet connection. I can then access it remotely from my house. I can easily backup my stuff to it. My backups are encrypted, both over the w…

Raspberry running an SSH daemon or rsync or attic or whatever?

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

#244
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…

You can try Yandex.Toloka. It has API (unfortunately not compatible with MT)

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

#245

A smart bank account: I want to set up rules like "take 19 percent of every incoming transaction and save it to virtual account 'taxes'. Use this, account to pay invoices by $financialAgency" Banking hasn't produced any innovation since online banking, it seems

You should be able to do this with a HBCI client like Hibiscus/Jameica or similar.

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

#246

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.…

3, 4, and the emotional support aspect of 2 read like you are pining for matrimony.

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

#247

A system for allowing all the devices on me to mount each other's storage seamless and make use of each other's various radios. It drives me cray that I can have a phone with a 4G antenna, a laptop with wireless, and a kindle all three speaking bluetooth, and yet they don't transparently for my 'personal lan'.

apple products do this - but you have to go all apple. It's pretty cool - when my phone rings and I'm typing on my mac, my mac starts ringing - so I can answer the phone on my mac. Same with texting when I 'm using my mac. Same thing happens with my iPad too, but I don't use that as much. I can play movies on my apple tv to from any of my devices. Same with phone 4g using from your mac when you're out and so on. It's a bit magical, but as always, the cost is your soul :-)

Edit: why the down vote? not my fault that's how things work.

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

#248
post #129

A 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…

A few days ago I came across a review of this:

http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/priv-by-blackberry/over...

Seems to be running on Android and has physical keyboard. Has anyone used this phone?

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

#249
post #196

An 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…

For typed, convertible files, global revision control, and possibly the access control enhancements you mention (for the other features ignorance begets silence), Urbit [0] may be of interest.

[0] urbit.org

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

#250
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SuSE fit what you're looking for (both are paid, commercial Linux distributions), or am I misunderstanding?

I remember RedHat as ugly. It would be closer to elementary.io, but paid. Well, the installation process of elementary.io displays unfriendly information too... At the extreme, choosing Mac OS X requires very few decisions, so I don't want to compare Linux distributions either. One distrib should stand out for my usecase, be clearly differentiated from the rest of the market and be the obvious choice for me. (that's…

SO, is your issue with a decent windows manager? I work on RHEL systems daily, and under the hood (sysd arguments not withstanding) its no more or less clunky than any other 'distro' out there. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what exactly you're looking to buy?
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