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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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441–450 of 535 posts

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

#441
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)

Thank you. This is the best available solution and I didn't know about it.

We'll probably go with it for now, until we hit a scale of tasks that justifies setting up a US subsidiary and dealing with the IRS.

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

#442
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…

Do you use custom software to interact with MTurk, or is there already some good software for interacting with it already? I have an image dataset I want classified and I've been putting it off for a while...

Sites like CrowdFlower have point-and-click interfaces that allow you to just upload a CSV and drag and drop its columns as fields in your task template.

What I used to do was host the images on a server, publicly, then upload the URL of the images and use it to display the images within the task. It's OK for one-offs. You get a thousand free rows with the CrowdFlower trial [1] and that's probably the most painless way to go for a classification problem.

In our case though, everything will be written in-house. Automation is how we keep headcount low.

[1] https://www.crowdflower.com/plans/

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

#443
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want a paid Linux . You want a paid Linux desktop-system - aka a "desktop environment software package" which support running on top of 3 most popular Linux server distros: RHEL, Ubuntu Server, Debian. The only reason I and a lot of other people use Linux on desktops is because everything we work on runs on Linux servers and we want the same OS on our machines that runs on the server (even if we also use vi…

> The only reason I and a lot of other people use Linux on desktops is because everything we work on runs on Linux servers That may be true, but there are also a lot of people (myself included) that just prefer a Linux OS. I like having a choice of desktop environments. I like that a huge amount of software is freely available and just a "suda apt-get install" away. I like that there's no shitty bloat-ware on my syst…

I truly think this is a great idea. Literally the only advantage imo of OSx over Ubuntu to me is beautiful UX. Theres so many little tweaks and customizations. Everything else in Ubuntu is superior imo so I still use it.

Or maybe even an 'easy to use' theming system?

I know you can change window managers but thats technical and dense. It would be nice to have a way for designers and front end devs to mess with the UX.

I know the Ubuntu and Linux team have way too much going on but this a wish post lol.

200 bucks for a well UXed OS with support I would pay that tomm!!

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

#444
post #174

A paid Linux. To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing. Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it's closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we're not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for wo…

I want this, but added to feature list I want it to have certified-bulletproof compatible laptops. Pick some really good, top of the line laptops like the excellent current Dell XPS series or the MacBook, and make the OS work flawlessly with them. Drivers, touchpad settings, battery management.

The have that certificstion system thats supposed to give you that info?

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google Contributor looks neat, and probably something I'll try out...but, I don't see any indication that privacy will be respected with their plan. Seems like I still need an ad blocker and a privacy-respecting web browser. It's unfortunate that something like Contributor can't be done in a peer-to-peer fashion. It requires a huge player with a visible impact on their entire web to be able to "sell" a different sort…

Youtube Red and Google Play Music come in a package, which is actually an awesome value. Red does support the creators whose videos you watch.

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

#446
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…

Prismatic was pretty good, but they had to stop due to lack of interest (and money).

prismatic was a good idea but it never worked for me. maybe i seeded it with bad information, maybe i used it wrong.

prismatic always gave me clickbait, it surfaced things that sort of interested me, but i didnt feel fulfilled after consuming them.

conversely, redef.com and aldaily.com and my personal facebook lists, along with hckrnews and techmeme and longform are a lot of work to browse through, but return very high quality results.

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

#447
post #35
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, the…

i think the complexity of tagging, moderation, and metamoderation stunted slashdots growth. digg and reddit were much easier to pick up.

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

#448

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.

https://hypothes.is

This allows you to paste in a link and discuss the website, as well as gather materials for research.

I'd like the ability to join many others who are learning the same thing. I think we need a method of referring to sub-topics so others can join in on the conversation. So many answers and information is stuck in forums with a generic thread title. Information will only grow- how can we better self-categorize the content we create so others can find it?

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

#449

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.

Ive been using it sucessfuly for over a year. Its moving forward quite well i think.

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

#450

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…

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?

Then let's just use email as the underlying infrastructure to message people! You would just need to build a ui to make it look like you were chatting with someone :)
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