Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?

- (an improvement) wormhole.app is nearly absolutely perfect but has trouble with very large files such as several gigabytes. Since it gives the link immediately I set a file to upload but it got stuck on the encryption stage, I only noticed when I checked it many hours later but I didn't get any indication it was stuck as opposed to just being slow. It probably uses an encryption algorithm that is not O(n) or something which is what encryption algorithms should use so that they can handle any file from 0 bytes to a few terabytes or something. It should only ever fail if the disk fails to read it for some reason, not due to any size constraint in the encryption algorithm on a desktop with 16 gigabytes of ram and lots of free disk space (in case it needs to make a local copy or something.) I think the encryption algorithm needs improvement so it handles large files better (I am basing this on where it gets stuck at the 'encrypting' stage for large files). improving this algorithm would let me use it for larger files or mailing myself a link, starting an upload before it's ready. I'm still going to keep using wormhole.app I think it's by far the easiest to use and best app - I just drag a file onto it and wait for it to complete then I know it's done. great app I use frequently for important things.

- (a new tool) I use a billionaire's laptop when I travel, something that isn't going to get stolen from me. sometimes I could use the power of a beefy server-class hardware for rendering a web app, for example my project management software isn't usable from this laptop. something where I could pay $50 per month for a remote desktop (that just runs chrome web apps nothing else), whenever I connect it swaps it into RAM and puts real power behind it, otherwise it swaps out to disk since I'm not using it. (I mention this requirement since web apps use enormous amount of state that they just load and keep locally - these can be swapped out to disk when a user isn't connected but when the user reconnects it needs to all go back into RAM quickly since the whole point of the service is to speed up web apps - the state shouldn't be discarded.) By the way clickup.com is the project management tool my laptop isn't really fast enough to load for example, I just use it from a desktop.

- (an improvement) clickup.com doesn't allow loading background images, this makes it unusable for my purposes since it is impossible to separate real products from vaporware. The CEO said he will fix it and they nearly have the required functionality, so hopefully this will just fix itself and let me use the tool. Besides this which makes it unusable it is really perfect. (If anyone works at clickup, vote on the issue to allow background pictures. it is as important as a cover is for a spy, I would say if I used clickup.com for anything actually important, lives would depend on it. the tool is unusable for me.)

- (a new tool) something like twitter but for KPI's. For example the only thing that matters to me in life is my happiness, it's been pegged at 10 for years, but sometimes people lie about how happy I am. (just as the CEO I mentioned would probably lie about whether any of his customers think his tool is unusable though I can't blame him.) So, it would be nice for me to be able to point them to the graph and say, well, that's not what the record shows. However, there is no record: there is noplace I can log in and put a 9.9 if my happiness ever drops from a 10 to a 9.9. I mean I guess I could track it on a Google document, I do that for some of my most important relationships, but I am thinking of something that will generate the graph for me as a permanent unalterable record - because that's what life is. Maybe one day I'll end up doing something mildly important, and if that ever happens it won't happen overnight, but if I ever make the history books, I'd like to be remembered as someone who lived happily and caused happiness around him along the way - my strategy at the moment is just to make sure I'm always 10/10 safe and happy, but sometimes (as with the stolen laptop example) it is hard for other people to know that. I'm not influenced by what other people think they want but from time to time I do like to share a record of reality. In the case of the Clickup CEO for example I would like to be able to show him that his tool has been unusable for me for 7 months or whatever (for example). The record doesn't lie. It's why I don't mind the fact that I can't use it on my travel laptop for example - it's unusable anyway. But who would believe it? It's such a small feature, Trello had it for years for example and many people say they are stuck with Trello due to this missing feature in Clickup. (Can you feel my anger??? It is certainly a very evocative question!)

Well, I really liked this question and it made me feel like someone is interested in providing good tools and functionality or improvements. that's a net win for everyone, so it makes me happy to see. (Specifically, the attitude of inquisitive helpfulness - great way to gather real requirements from real people, since otherwise we all risk spending all our time trisecting an angle (a famous unsolved problem in Greek geometry that wouldn't offer any benefits even if it were solved. We have protractors that are more than good enough for any real-world project.))