Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Products I Wish Existed

blog.eladgil.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 434 posts

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#171

Post by vld »

I'd love a service that puts me in touch (for a fee) with an engineer/someone above level 1-2 support from Google/Amazon/huge corps

When dealing with companies that are above a certain size, it takes days or weeks to get to someone that can fix issues, but if you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works there he can expedite your ticket. This service would work like that, a friend that puts you in touch with people hired at big corps.

I'm aware this service would have a number of potential issues, such as how to get employees on the platform without annoying their employers, or how to prevent abuse/bribes, but if somebody find a way..

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#172

Post by coldtea »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #100

> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch. That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul…

>Why would you trade the vibrancy of your young urban block or the sense of trust and community in your suburb against prevention of low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs?

It's a big and a privileged assumption that the worse that happens in neighbours is "low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs" or that otherwise they resemble a "vibrant young urban block".

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#173

Post by take_a_breath »

munificent wrote: post #135
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #100

> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch. That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul…

I agree with your overall point. However: > low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs? I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here. Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows up, etc. Yo…

If package theft is the problem, maybe the real solution is something closer to "Package Theft Insurance" than "Cloud-based Neighborhood Surveillance."

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#174

Post by JohnFen »

secabeen wrote: post #86
eropple wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices. Are you sure? How can we as citizens verify it?

> Are you sure? I'm not. Do I think it's likely that they are? No. > How can we as citizens verify it? The same way we verify that Google isn't producing broad-scale AI systems looking for specific subsets of people across the GMail data. Investigative reporting, whistle-blowers, regulation/lawmaking, and looking closely at the evidence presented when the government acts. This is why parallel construction is pernicio…

So, in other words, citizens can't verify anything. Instead, all we can do is hope that any abuse will eventually be noticed and reported by some random whistleblower somewhere.

That's hardly sufficient, and especially not with a company like Amazon.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#175

Post by AznHisoka »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #102
dsalzman wrote: post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

>Global 2000 company IT needs. Splunk is a good example of this. I've worked at several public and private muti-billion dollar orgs, and they all rant and rave about how good Splunk is over whatever else they were using. So, build more splunks. Maybe something that aggregates monitoring multiple servers. A plug and play Status Dashboard for a company's internal apps. Like this: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en…

If you knew the technologies/software that Fortune 2000 companies are spending the most on, you should build complementary products, or similar things that solve the same problems those products are solving?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#176

Post by coldtea »

triceratops wrote: post #167
munificent wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall point. However: > low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs? I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here. Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows up, etc. Yo…

> get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, These seem like reasonable solutions. Why not just do them? > I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my porch, but can do nothing about it. So what will more surveillance technology do? Maybe the innovation needed is apartment-community style mailboxes or dropboxes where only the mailperson and the tenant can have access, but scaled to single-family-home…

>>> get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, >These seem like reasonable solutions. Why not just do them?

Because that's bending broken backwards to accept a broken neighbourhood and society.

Where this stops? "Drive-by's are a thing, accept it and just were a bulletproof vest, it's a sensible solution"?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#177

Post by JohnFen »

Scoundreller wrote: post #76
cgriswald wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also social cues and the lack of an ever present mob. A lot of people who are political activists online are not actually that confident in their views and absent the audience and ready defenders, won't express their views because they know they can't back it up in a one-on-one conversation. Our city did a traffic survey of a local street that is the primary route for everyone going from surrounding neighbo…

Heh, a road to my parents’ used to be riddled with potholes and uneven sewer grates (Canadian winters + drainage issues probably). The city spent months ripping it up and paving it nice and smooth. Then a couple months later they put up speed bumps. We spent a lot of money to get back to the speeds people already drove.

I once lived on a street that was incredibly badly maintained. The city informed the residents that they would be repaving the street and the residents campaigned hard for the city not to do that, for precisely the reasons you're talking about here.

Their campaign was successful, in no small measure because a poll of the residents showed 95% of them opposed the repaving, and that the local paper wrote a big story about the whole affair.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#178

Post by blackbrokkoli »

cortesoft wrote: post #94
runjake wrote: post #8

#4 is a no-go in my book. Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants. I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now I glance at the…

Yeah, that sounds horrible... if it is anything like Nextdoor, there will be three posts a day about "There was a black guy sitting in his car!"

Nah, you are thinking way to short-term.

The AI will flag the black person himself as often associated with complaints and posts tagged "danger". Thus barring him from job interviews and loans by other automated services (Uber, but for HR!) who bought the data set "to elevate user experience".

Creeping right back to apartheid, but I would say entirely worth it if it means I can get a notification that my cappuccino creamer was stolen 5 minutes ago by an unidentifiable person! /s

Post reply on HN