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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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401–410 of 535 posts

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

#401

A gmail application that would parse through your email (old and new) and collect all contact information without having to do this manually. Especially helpful if this can be done for older backed up email.

This looks similar to what you asked for: https://www.evercontact.com/. Not open source, though.

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

#402
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous how? It'd have to be built on top of a network that worked like the Onion network. At which point there'd be absolutely massive overhead, and you can already today just use the Onion network to torrent (though it's a pretty dick move to do so).

Anonymous means your ISP knows that you connected to this network, and neither they nor anybody else knows anything else. Tor has a lot of weaknesses, but yes I'm just talking about a better Tor. What I want is a network designed so that it's mathematically impossible for person, government, or LEO to regulate the transmission of any given bit from one place to another. The whole point would be to eliminate all the p…

I'm not sure 100% fool proof anonymous digital communication can exist. You can always trace the source of a digital signal. Bitmessage is a pretty cool solution that is "close enough" in my opinion. You should check that out.

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

#403

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.…

Almost reads like a list of reasons to move back to mom's house.

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

#404
post #236

An operating system built around IPFS. This would make the browser/native dichotomy irrelevant by offering the best of both worlds and then some. AFAIK the reason web apps have become so popular is because they load quickly and don't require the user to manage installation and updating. IPFS would achieve the speed through caching and the installing/updating process with its namespaces feature.

How is this better than an OS based on http, besides privacy and democracy? I'm very interested in this idea, I just don't know if "normal" people care enough about P2P for something like this to receive mainstream adoption.

Because of performance and reliability. Something built on top of something like IPFS makes the application generally faster and more stable. Gives you the benefit of being able to navigate things while being offline as well.

Imagine a social media, where if you're in a office and the connection to the general internet dies, all communicating within the office still works.

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

#405

A 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…

It would just make the price of land go up proportionally

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

#406
post #236

An operating system built around IPFS. This would make the browser/native dichotomy irrelevant by offering the best of both worlds and then some. AFAIK the reason web apps have become so popular is because they load quickly and don't require the user to manage installation and updating. IPFS would achieve the speed through caching and the installing/updating process with its namespaces feature.

How is this better than an OS based on http, besides privacy and democracy? I'm very interested in this idea, I just don't know if "normal" people care enough about P2P for something like this to receive mainstream adoption.

Performance: With HTTP you have to constantly check if what you have cached is up to date because it could change. And a bunch of other little performance advantages.

Immutability: with HTTP you have to save things you care about because they might disappear/move in the future. With IPFS you could pretty much always rely on at least Google holding a copy of something in the long term.

Basically the idea is to remove the concept of local vs remote files at the OS level. So as a user of the OS the file browser and the web browser are the same application. They shouldn't even be able to tell if something is on their computer or not. This could be implemented on HTTP but only as a prototype.

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

#408
A PowerPoint replacement:

* multiplatform editor

* portable output in HTML/CSS/JS

* zooming and rotating à la Prezi (in addition to silly classic frame transitions that I never use)

* native support for SVG

don't make me export to a bitmap

no need for a native editor (SmartArt) when it can't beat Inkscape

* clipart, image and template library (drag&drop)

both a free one like openclipart.org

and a subscription-based professional one

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

#409

Implement wikipedia as a Web 3.0 aka decentralized service using technologies like IPFS. To show that this kind of setup can be cheaper than what they are running on today.

You might want to look into "Smallest Federated Wiki" by Ward Cunningham that is looking into using IPFS for example: http://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/view/interplanetary-file-sys...
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