This is more of a re-engineering of modern society. I want a drone that carries babies and small children and follows you around. It can follow your car or follow you into large stores like Target and Walmart. That way I can go about my day with my kids effortlessly hovering around at all times.
Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
371–380 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#372A great-looking, affordable, modular home kit. We did it 100 years ago with the Sears houses -- imagine what we could do nowadays with mass production and 3-d printing? Imagine if you could order a home kit and save half of what a traditional builder would charge you? How would that change opportunities for the middle class? In a similar, Maslow's-Hierarchy-of-Needs vein, it would be great to have an app that crowdso…
You likely wouldn't save half, I would guess ~20-30% provided you do the majority of the assembly. The era of Sears homes benefitted from lax or non-existent building code (especially for electrical/plumbing). You may also have problems selling the house in the future being it was not built by a professional. In the near term you may be unable to get financing (if you do, it will likely be much higher than a standard…
It's amazing how complicated and expensive we've made something that is relatively simple.
I've built most of a couple of stick-built houses and additions (fortunately in areas that have less insane regulatory codes), from the foundation up. It's really not that hard to do right.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#3731) 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.
haha perhaps matrimony would address some of the issues (I am starting to approach THAT age). I'm just a big picture guy and over the years, I don't think that tech has helped that much in addressing some of the more fundamental life problems. Some exceptions (skype to chat with relatives abroad, facebook/social apps to a small extent, my hospital finally creating a website, youtube fitness tutorials, etc). Tech can totally help solve these problems, but there's a ceiling I hit on all of those categories that require me to continuously exert a high amount of willpower to break.
What I want someone to "build" is the cultural environment to make it easier for me to be proactive about my wants. I want a sense of community with my city. I want friends who make themselves more available (and to be one myself). Maybe these are the things that an idyllic small city supposedly offers that big cities do not? I don't know why people don't really talk about these topics often, but maybe it's just me.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#374Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#375A 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…
Hey there—I'm CEO and cofounder of Scale API (YC S16, https://scaleapi.com), which is a developer-first API for human tasks. We allow customers outside the US, and are much more focused on quality than MTurk.
Definitely give us a shot, and feel free to email me if you have any questions! alex@scaleapi.com
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if in the last 20 years we've learned that browser is not the proper place for applications?
Why would you say that? The browser has become the most successful app platform ever built.
I would have said Windows was the most successful app platform ever built.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#377A people-focussed email client. Pretty much all email clients are message/thread based. I'd rather have them people-based: A sidebar that shows a list of people who I have recently interacted with; and clicking on them shows all messages I've exchanged with them. I don't really care about threads, because people just don't know how to use them. But even if they do, it often isn't clear when to start a new thread vs.…
Wemail: http://www.wemailapp.com/
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#378A 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…
This. It's baffling; we've "solved" email – anyone can have an account with any provider and is able to mail anyone else – why haven't been able to do the same with instant messaging already?
Because email was already standard when internet became commercial; if you wanted to be part of it, you had to have some email infrastructure set up.
Today no company needs any IM, it's only a product (instead of a communication protocol) geared towards the masses. There's little business reason for them to use a standard protocol.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#379A 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.
Facebook?
Ok, so it's your first time in, say, Anchorage. How would you use Facebook to find interesting app-guided walks or tours, or a story told using RL locations?
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#380An 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…
> 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 application creates a pdf file but the data it writes out doesn't look like valid pdf data, it's rejected. Or, if a process tries to write out an mp3 file, the OS converts it to an ogg file to store on disk and converts it back if the application tries to open it later as an mp3.