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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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261–270 of 535 posts

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

#261

Fantasy Tourism [1]. A VR app or game that lets me explore (or live in) fictional cities and places from popular works or standalone art. Like Hobbiton, Coruscant, the torus-city of Sigil from Planescape, or the Venice-on-Mars from the Aria manga/anime. [1]: https://medium.com/@Razengan/virtual-reality-fantasy-tourism...

These guys are trying to do that for Kyoto

http://kyoto-vr.com/

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the spam threat. Controlling identity (for example by knowing for sure the sender's phone number) allows for a huge mitigation of spam.

What's different about email?

In email you have sender impersonation. Once blocked, adding a new sender (cell number) is expensive. It is 12 orders of magnitude easier to spam with email than it is to spam with whatsapp.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no technical reason for them to be walled gardens, only business reasons, which are at odds with my privacy and general happiness. Then pay them! Hosting fees are not gratis.

Where should I sign up for the "privacy-respecting, no-advertising" facebook plan? Twitter have one of those, too?

Nope, but google is trying. See google contributor and youtube red. Start there.

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

#265
post #140

I hypothesize that the list of ideas that will be posted here will make for great examples of what not to build if you're considering commercial value. Developers and the HN crowd make for a very small market and are very hard to monetize. In that vein, I wish someone would build a list of things that regular, everyday folks actually would want and use. The middle manager working at BigCorp; the teenager; the stay-at…

Thought of this idea as a platform; Did market research; Not enough people think of their own problems in solvable terms; Also a lot of problems are too small ("mosquito bite") or general complaints about the situation ("it's too hot in southern France").

Might work as a curated list, but then it is hard to scale.

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

#266

An ebook reader/protocol that would let me write or read comments left by other readers or the author(s). It would also be nice to be able chat with other people currently reading the book, especially for more technical books. Basically, make ebooks a bit more like MOOCs.

That would require internet access and a login and cookies and all the annoyances that go with these things. It seems rather unfeasible given the convenience that most ebook systems go for.

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

#267
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…

Like the pyra/pandora? https://pyra-handheld.com/

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

#268

Just noting that many answers here are of the type "an aggregator for x" to unify something (news, messaging, sports data, storage across devices, ...). Perhaps interesting would be to find these themes that make good idea-builders.

Many small, money-making apps are just spreadsheets with better UI

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

#269

A decent solution for adding to / viewing Org-mode files on iOS. MobileOrg is abandoned and was super clunky for editing. Currently I use IFTTT do note to append to a txt file in Dropbox which is re-filed later using a python script, but it's hacky..

I do something similar, except I have a shell script that pipes my notes out of Letterspace into a single giant text file, which I made a little web tool to filter by hashtags. Know anyone else who has this problem?

Also, do you happen to have the pain point of not being able to connect a related notes with current org-mode as well?

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