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Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

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171–180 of 198 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#171
post #97

Something like a Netflix for books and articles. I'd pay just to rent textbooks for general education classes. It would need to have a gigantic library though, big enough to guarantee that I would be able to find any book through there if it wasn't in a library. PDF versions of the books would be nice to, so I could access the book anywhere immediately. And it would need a good selection of scientific books. I have a…

It's called Bookswim, available at http://www.bookswim.com/ , and I have no idea whether it's good, because I cannot conceive of using them over the library.

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#173
post #6

A combination proxy/script/something that'd pop up an interstitial task tracker/to-do list overview when I go to any of a list of "time-sink" sites. I can click "snooze" and go to the time sink, with the task tracker popping back up after 5,10,30 minutes, turn it off for a day or two, or click through to the detail/edit view for any task and get to work.

Leechblock + NowDoThis is my solution to this. I don't actually use NowDoThis, but it's default is to have it's own name in big letters, which is enough to remind me to stop slacking.

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#174
post #163

the pre-1992 version of usenet

Voted up, because I am actually planning to pay for a giganews feed, now that Time Warner killed there usenet servers.

Missing the point, dude. Its not about what you have access to group-wise, but rather what's posted on the groups. In this case, he's asking for intelligent discussion instead of warez.

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#175

Bachelor Chow (See: Futurama). It doesn't have to be particularly tasty, but a simple meal that has 1/3 of your daily nutrition (with 1/3 RDA of all your vitamins and minerals) would be great. Preferably without ridiculous quantities of preservatives and artificial flavours.

This is ideally a great product, if you can solve three practical problems. 1. Nutritional needs depend on age, time, body, activities, etc. 2. The desire for tasty food often greatly out-weights the desire for nutritional food. 3. Evolutionarily, we were designed to want more than what we need.

Well there are some solutions to those problems, #1 is simple, they do it with dog food. You just need a junior, adult, senior and light varieties (which may help in regards to #3 by being able to eat larger portion sizes if you're hungry).

#2 might be a little trickier, although if it's sold how it's shown in the show (literally as human dog food in giant bags) you could easily include a dozen flavor packets. If the food on its own was fairly flavorless, preferably with a meat-like quality to mix well with different flavor packs.

#3 is probably the trickiest. The solution is probably just like any food, moderation. However, when people receive adequate nutrition this behavior does tend to decrease, but evolution is a harsh mistress and like most animals we've evolved to build up fat reserves to try and survive.

Honestly #1 and #2 can easily be solved by standard market practices in both dog food and human pre-made meals. #3 is the stickler and aside from moderation I don't know what could help, except maybe a big sticker saying 'THREE MEALS IS ALL YOU NEED' might subconsciously stop a few of the gullible people who respond easily to suggestion (read: the people who keep telemarketers rich).

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#176

Bachelor Chow (See: Futurama). It doesn't have to be particularly tasty, but a simple meal that has 1/3 of your daily nutrition (with 1/3 RDA of all your vitamins and minerals) would be great. Preferably without ridiculous quantities of preservatives and artificial flavours.

If I remember correctly the Dilberito was designed along those lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilberito

I believe I only ever had one Dilberito when on a vacation to the US, now I'm living in Canada I might be able to help turn Scott Adams into a major food mogul.

Screw you 'Chef' Boyardee, hello Chef Catbert!

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#177
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's tough. It's even worse when you have a small baby and the grandparents are far away:-/ Here's an idea for someone: Virtual Grandpa - some sort of telepresence thing that's been made a bit robust so that a kid can drag it around and drop it without problems. Maybe like a robust cell phone with a decent size screen and camera? I actually wouldn't mind working on that too, but feel free to run with it. The…

Great idea. A Chumby with a built-in video camera + gtalk/video support might fit the bill.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#178
post #92
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've lived in two countries, actually, and visited many others. Madrid was the only place where i managed to find decent mexican food.

I had decent Mexican food in London. It wasn't spectacular, but I remember enjoying it.

London is one of those sorts of places where you could probably find anything, but it's an outlier.

Re: Ask HN: What would you love to pay for if it was available?

#179

streaming NFL games.

streaming NHL games for me but same concept :). I feel bad for all the brits at my work that are probably dying to see good soccer on the TV and can't find any. They'd probably love a streaming sports site as well.

Streaming formula 1 races.
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