Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by kkarakk » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 11:34 AM UTC

vmarsy wrote: post #145

sssilver wrote: post #30

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…

On my windows phone 7 I was able to seamlessly message my friend via text or Skype or Facebook message, all in the same conversation thread, which was searchable. and when going on his page see his Facebook and twitter updates in one page. From Wikipedia: > Windows Phone 7's messaging system is organized into "threads". This allows a conversation with a person to be held through multiple platforms (such as Windows Li…

too bad windows apps required a comprehensive bottom to top knowledge of windows stuff. for example - built an android app while learning java in school. didn't know what everything did but the outcome was the same as promised in the tutorial meanwhile in the windows 7 app tutorials, phrases like "do this as you would do in wcf so & so and it should work" were thrown about leading to an endless nesting doll structure of learning what the definitions meant- that led to 4 weeks of on again off again learning before i made a copy of my android app. the tutorials improved later but i'd given up on windows app development by then, the promised free support for windows app developers never materialised in my country

great platform decisions, poor app developer support and shitty ecosystem(still haven't considered developing for the windows 10 appstore because of this reason).

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

#462

Post by kkarakk » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 11:47 AM UTC

EliRivers wrote: post #376

dwaltrip wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

keyword is was. no one is excited about making innovative windows apps, it's a way to get your thing out to everyone but with all the traditional blocks(users have to find and install, different configurations might mess up your app etc)

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

#463

Post by kkarakk » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 11:55 AM UTC

burrows wrote: post #98

samblr wrote: post #33

Editor's code completion based on deep learning.

This is a cool idea. Could we use github repos as the training data?

sounds like a great way to get a morass of code spaghetti as quick as possible. "what does this module do?" "i dunno but it makes the webpage load really quickly without me having to optimise!" "why is it 2 years old?" "because when i replace it with anything else, load times jump by a factor of 2 across the board and i dunno why"

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

#464

Post by saiprashanth93 » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

firewalkwithme wrote: post #184

A thing that removes thought loops from the brain

Meditation is supposed to do this to you. Remove negative thought patterns.

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

#465

Post by tommynicholas » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

psynapse wrote: post #227

tommynicholas wrote: post #6

API for sports data. If you want to build a great product based on sporting data, it is crazy hard to get. I think someone that made the pipes to all sports data (stats, schedules, lines, etc) could facilitate a lot of good innovation and build a solid business. Not sure if this is a VC scale business, but I think it should exist and I'd love to be a user if someone built it.

TXODDS has various pull/push APIs. Betting odds is the focus, but they have more fixture/stats/resulting services under development and can be approached for custom solutions. https://txodds.com/

SOLID thanks!

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

#466

Post by erklik » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #221

tajen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We can't do it because it's a different business model than Apple's" ;) ? From 9Gag to HN, Windows 10 is a recurring meme of disrespect for the -cattle- consumer, in a world of Snowden and Facebook where we don't even own our computers. I say there's a demand (with money available) for a trustworthy OS in the PC world, and for a open-source in the Apple world. Selling today's OSes might be impossible indeed. But a l…

Nobody (as in the general population) cares about all of that, unless they have been personally bitten by it. Someone needs to take some Linux and focus solely on the desktop environment. Make it more beautiful than OSX and Win10 and that may drive attention. That's an awful lot of work (not only the apps but getting the ecosystem to cooperate). We've driven ourselves into the ground with our desire for free things.…

Isn't Ubuntu basically functional and beautiful? I mean i installed Ubuntu for my mother, father and my sister's laptop. ( All of who only use their laptop for either watch Netflix or word=processing etc ). They were quite happy with it. They have been using it for a year now.

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

#467

Post by erklik » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:11 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #359

amelius wrote: post #253

1. A worthy Google search competitor. Preferably open, open-source, federated, respecting privacy. 2. A platform where scientists can discuss publications. It should be a "home" for every paper. Of course, also open, run by a nonprofit organization, or perhaps even federated. 3. A good open (xkcd-927-defying) standard for chat that everybody will use. (Why can we have this for email, but not for chat?)

1. Duckduckgo?

Doesn't work as well. However, i love bangs or the feature to just search from the main field into other websites.

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

#468

Post by erklik » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #343

apapli wrote: post #264

A way for me to get what is in my head on paper without having to write it. Or 30 hours in a single day, whichever is easier :)

Voice to text?

Brain-Reading.

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

#469

Post by webwanderings » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

_nalply wrote: post #454

webwanderings wrote: post #44

Instead of building, strengthen the independent pipe which is responsible for flowing the data/information across the Internet. I am talking about RSS. I wish more technical and policy people would consider supporting, or reviving, the RSS. RSS is practically not owned by anyone (like how email flows from one platform to another without ownership restrictions). The modern API world has proliferated silos and boundari…

Yes. I am constantly telling people to switch to email after having contacted them on Facebook, WhatsApp and Quora. It would be nice if there is some enforced standard to exchange personally written information. Why not return to email? Perhaps upgrade email, for example by using utf-8? I have no idea, however, how to create a compatible upgrade path. This would be my wish: Someone should create a feasible upgrade pa…

I asked somewhere here, if there is a way to extract the email addresses out of Facebook (or Twitter), of friends etc. Apparently there is no solution (probably because these locked walled-gardens do not allow such extraction, even when you have first layer of trust established, i.e, I am only talking about extracting the email addresses of friends on Facebook).

So the gist is, that it is not really technically easy to have people move back to email's personal communication. I gave up on Facebook and I am not on any of these other social networks. I'd rather just communicate with people via email or personal text.

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

#470

Post by carussell » Sun, Sep 25, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

lj3 wrote: post #437

carussell wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero-install is half of the reason why browsers are popular. The other half is that the Web puts the users in far more control over the content in their viewport than anything else that has been widely deployed except for probably Microsoft Excel. If your first thought is that desire for control is a niche thing, an instance of power users projecting their biases onto the rest of the world and not a concern for some…

That doesn't explain the popularity of mobile apps among the "everyman". They're not very customizable, but they're considerably more popular than either the regular or mobile web. > If your first thought is that desire for control is a niche thing, an instance of power users projecting their biases onto the rest of the world and not a concern for some mythical "everyman", you are wrong. Evidence? Sales numbers tend…

> Most people don't enjoy having to spend any time on getting anything to work or customizing anything to their liking.

Well that's great, because those aren't words I ever said. The first person to start talking about customizing things is you.

I'm not going to be nudged into mounting a defense for an argument that I never tried to make.