Products I Wish Existed • Hacker News Board

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#271

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

Plyphon_ wrote: post #31

rtkwe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…

I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked fr…

> The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to hand over an entire copy of their data for them to index.

That sounds like a reasonable response. At least, I know that would be a showstopper for me, personally.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#272

Post by pbourke » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

ckosidows wrote: post #248

#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…

> We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit groups of people and interests

Group chat: text/Messages/WhatsApp. The fewer frills, the better.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#273

Post by wDcBKgt66V8WDs » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #263

wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are gentrifying city streets that I, a white male, will not walk down because the entire street is new construction with builder included Ring systems. I don't want to walk down a street and have literally 30 people get notifications on their phones that I'm there. I can't imagine how the local PoC that are getting pushed back feel about that. Existing neighborhood watch networks already have people crying wolf…

I guarantee you whatever route you take in a city, you will fall under the gaze of at least one security camera. It doesn't appear you have any evidence for your viewpoints, just vague fears, topped off with a standard appeal of "what about PoCs?"

Yeah but there's a difference between an entire street of personal security systems accompanied by apps and social networks built on fear mongering.

"just vague fears" they're called opinions which I'm allowed to have and voice in a public forum. Sorry for trying to consider the well being of the less privileged overly targeted people getting aggressively kicked out of their neighborhood.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#274

Post by jbigelow76 » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #257

jbigelow76 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. An ex-Googler (that never played defense![1]) tried that with the social network Path. I think the limit was 50 friends though. It failed. Edit: [1] Quote attribution: "I don’t use a ring of any kind on my phone. This is so that I am always on offense and never defense." - Dave Morin

To be fair, almost every non-Facebook social network has failed. I wouldn’t consider that to be proof that a limited social network can’t succeed but rather that social networking sites are difficult to produce.

No disagreement here. I just recall that guy being comically pompous (see also his penchant for carrying both a "day iphone" and a "night iphone") at the time Path launched.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#275

Post by joshpadnick » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #265

joshpadnick wrote: post #259

#1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers. I've spent countless hours researching Global PEOs and reviewing their often poorly written contracts. If a reputable service existed that allowed us to hire in any country without having to form our own corporate entity in that country, we'd be ready to sign yesterday. Unfortunately, all existing services are either: * Too new (There are promising upstarts, but th…

What does PEO mean and what existing services have you found?

PEO stands for "Professional Employer Organization" and is an American term for a company that serves as the legal employer for the people you want to hire. For example, see https://justworks.com/. When an employee joins our company, they legally become an employee of JustWorks, but we're the practical employers. It's purely a legal relationship.

This is welcome the USA government because they know these companies help us achieve compliance better than we could on our own. JustWorks has been great, but only employs people in the USA. When we want to employ someone outside the USA, we therefore need to find a "global PEO." These companies are sometimes called "Employers of Record."

Popular Global PEOs are:

- Globalization Partners

- Elements Global

- Capital GES

- Pilot.co

- Lots more.

But it's a highly fragmented market and has been a pain to engage.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#276

Post by EamonLeonard » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #260

EamonLeonard wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-founder of Boundless here, thanks @hailpixel for the shout out. AMA! Here's a link to my soundcloud, we're hiring, thanks for coming to my TEDx talk. We are hiring though.

Any jobs page? Couldn't find it on the site linked above. I am frontend developer looking for a remote position

Drop me a mail: eamon@boundlesshq.com

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#277

Post by Wistar » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #226

dsalzman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?

... along with how to write a good search query

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#278

Post by Wistar » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Products I'm glad do NOT exist: 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch. Ring is gross enough, thank you very much.

My ex-neighborhood (Magnolia in Seattle) has had Flock Safety install 6 "AI" camera systems, two at each of the three entry/exit point of the neighborhood. Each installation has a camera overseeing entering traffic and one overseeing exiting traffic. The cameras have license-plate recognition and object detection for car color/make/model, pedestrians, bicyclists and even animals. Flock Safety charges $2,000 per year per camera. Magnolia is one of about 10 Seattle-area neighborhoods with Flock Safety cameras installed. The Magnolia residents themselves pay for the cameras and service. They all can log in to a web service and see the footage and ALPR lists, timestamps, etc.

Friends I have who live there are thrilled with the system although the Seattle police seem to have little interest in the system telling the residents that they are only interested in seeing footage that shows suspicious activities or is directly related to a crime.

https://www.flocksafety.com/

Porch pirates are so bad in my new neighborhood that I admit to wanting one of these on my dead-end culdesac and have investigated what it would take to build such a system myself.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#279

Post by henryfjordan » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #262

henryfjordan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airtable did some great work on the UX. Introducing people to table schemas with typed columns is pretty awesome, and the creative way they've leveraged that with the little tab that comes out of the side for either a nice view over the data (e.g. a map for an address column) or for showing Pivot Tables/Aggregations. They deserve some design awards for those ideas. But it's not a great alternative to a DB. It's reall…

Awesome. Thanks for Validating. I'm going to spend the next year of my life building exactly that. Right now I've just put it a manifesto with some ideas at http://orows.com , but will be coming out with a proof of concept very soon.

Cool! I'll add one more thought that I think might be particularly useful

> Granular permissions not only at row level but field level too. You can share parts of data with others for editing or have it view-only with ability for commenting and accepting suggestions

In my org (and I suspect many), many of the Sales/Operations people maintain Google Sheets with links into our internal apps. Generally it's TODO lists or other little organizational/workflow type stuff

What I think makes Airtable so powerful is that foreign-keys are first class. You can create a table and include references to rows from other tables. This allows the end user to create tables to support their workflows directly in the same tool they use to manage the data, and means I don't have to build that same functionality into the CRUD app (and until you're deep in a workflow it's hard to get it perfect, so there's always back-and-forth).

A good permission system would allow me to create a set of "core tables" that I tightly control the schema of, but allow others to still create tables which reference this one.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#280

Post by hobofan » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

reasonattlm wrote: post #113

I can't say as I like his take on the longevity industry. It is the take that will produce few meaningful advances, the "looking under the lamp because that's where the light is" way of approaching life. Just more marginally better drugs that do a little bit more than those of 10 years ago. Sadly investors probably care very little from a financial position as to whether a drug works or not, as their exit usually hap…

Love your blog! Recently got interested in longevity research, as I was surprised how much closer to reality it is than I imagined, and also as a possible future industry to work in, and your blog has been one of the best resources to both get up to speed on the topic and also keep up to date!

As you are as familiar as few people are with the topic, I'd like to ask you for some advice, if possible: What do you think is the best way for someone like me (currently biochem undergrad, with ~7 years broad software engineering experience), to have an impact in the field?