Ask HN: Idea Sunday

Regarding the main weakness, I think you nailed it. That being said, one could make a pretty convincing argument to the home owner that by participating in such a service, even at a premium, they'd actually save thousands of dollars. By keeping a home well maintained, you can avoid many of the big repairs that you'd otherwise be subject to. Most people don't caulk cracks when they first appear. They don't check their siding and roofing for cracks and leaks on a regular basis. They don't change out their furnace filter every winter. And a 100 other things they should be doing but aren't.

And you're right - people don't budget for the big issues. And that's all the more reason they need a service like this. A monthly, predictable bill is more manageable than a series of big, one time hits.

As for maintenance debt, pricing might need to take into account the age of the various components (roof, fence, siding, ect...). And, of course, any pre-existing conditions (ie. roof needs repaired now) wouldn't be covered at all.

I actually did come across some of these companies when searching for a one stop solution. I'll call a few and see if any of them are interested in servicing my home. I wonder why they've never tried to tap this additional market. My guess is that they are not equipped to deal with individual home owners, instead preferring to deal with landlords that own multiple properties.

If I could find a good reputable property management company in each city, I wonder if a business could be built around them. I'd be the single point of contact for the home owners, subcontracting the work to the property management companies. Hmm, definitely worth some research.

How intrusive would the developer environment have to be? We're a "host your own REST service" development shop so deploying and testing your own GitHub repo is done with a dashboard from a web page. In our eyes, everything outside of code development and code hosting should take place in a web page complemented with command line tools for advanced control.

The feedback we have heard is the editor of choice is near-and-dear to a developer and would be difficult to force a new tool on anyone to edit code. Code hosting has a good solution with GitHub too. Which leaves testing and deployment up to the platform. Since we focus on giving two free REST services for publishing your own Jobs we put the deployment and testing into our web dashboard (and cli tool). Testing a REST API is easy and already integrated into our dashboard similar to Postman. The only code a developer has to write is a Job which is just 3 simple parts (inputs, outputs, and tasks). For us we wanted the .Net debugging power for every developer from our dashboard so we built it to identify tests that fail validation based off your test inputs and outputs versus your test's expected outputs.

Let me know what you think here's our beta vision based off our feedback for quickly developing and deploying REST API services for your own Jobs: https://flowstacks.com/developer/

Cheers

Full text search of Youtube videos.

How many times have you watched a video, maybe an hour long conference and wanted to go back to a point in the video where something specific was mentioned. You have to skim to the area where you think it happened, and then re-watch the video until you find what you're looking for. That sucks.

Even if Youtube allowed people to embed the full transcript of a video in some kind of search layer with corresponding points in the video that would be a dream.

Besides that I'd like a web browser built on 'the hive' that eliminates advertising. If you want to browse the web without being tracked, traced, prodded and harassed you could install the browser and a small, unnoticeable amount of your CPU is used to help power the hive. I would then like to see that operating system give a charitable donation every 6 months that says they will donate 1 month of computational power to a research organization.

One thing I've always wanted to create is a competition website like Kaggle but with real world results. Let's say I create this and go to Mount Sinai hospital in NYC and tell them that I want to run a contest. The contest is to anybody who thinks they can increase Mount Sinai's margins by X percentage within a particular area of interest. The agreement with Mount Sinai is that they have to give us all of the available data and we will open-source it. The challenge for open-source folks is to review the data and if you can find a way to increase margins by X percentage while still upholding the same level of quality, you win the prize. Let's say Mount Sinai gives us access to the entire spreadsheet of products they order from hospital gowns to radiation machines, or even lets say we fund a $100,000 bounty to anybody or any team who can reduce their emergency room wait times by 50%.

You could solve the problem in any way possible, improving hardware/software, or simply finding redundancy in logistics.

Hospitals are probably not the best examples but I hope you see what I'm getting at...

Another benefit of a successful implementation of this idea is that it could allow for a simple paper trail as evidence of good maintence which, in turn, may allow sellers to command higher prices: similar to vehicle maintenance records.