It's time for another go at this question; we had interesting ideas the last time. What do you wish someone would build, either for your personal use or for your business?
Edit: fixed typo
Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
1–10 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#2I wish someone would build "Thunderbird" as a chrome application... Right now, there's not really a good multi-site email applciation... even if it were limited to IMAP, or on-server. Not sure what the limits on localStorage or indexedDB are for chrome apps. Would be happy if it stored the credentials online somehow allowing me to use it wherever.
That's what I'd like to see, though I get most of what I need with webmail a cross-platform, portable email app would be really nice, where I control the data, not stored on someone else's platform, or from a party that doesn't control the platform. Though I do think if dropbox made such an app that used my dropbox for storage space I'd consider it.
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For that matter hosted/paid web apps... You buy an account on the platform with X compute and Y storage for $Z/month, could be built as a shim over DigitalOcean or the like... that just loads whatever apps you pay for, and/or free apps on the platform... you login, use your apps and they stay there, for you to access at-will.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#3A gmail clone with privacy monetized via charging me $50 or so a year. I'm currently a fastmail subscriber, and it is nowhere near as good as gmail.
Fastmail specifically is deficient in several ways:
* gmail conversations. it is threads done correctly. Fastmail half-does this but the seams peek through all over the place. Eg you don't have labels, you have actual folders and those two aren't the same at all.
* fastmail search is still mediocre, and is clearly intended to be used via their graphical menu rather than typing folder/label restrictions or other modifiers in the search box.
* A gmail style iphone + android app that works offline
* better polish throughout the app (eg: if something is incorrectly assigned as spam, when you say not spam, message routing rules don't apply to it. If you create a filter, you have no option to apply to existing messages. I could go on and on.)
* spam detection that works way better
Fastmail may eventually be what I want however. They've definitely improved over the last 2 years. Eg they used to use 2fa as a monetization source (10c or so per text message!) and have recently made gmail style 2fa free. They've also turned their settings UI from appallingly bad (it looked and felt like a very junior developer's first js project) to pretty good. Similarly with their rules routing engine.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#4I wish someone would build an interactive teaching AI, (perhaps in a mathematical context at first). For example, the user might start with a goal such as, "I'd like to understand singular value decomposition." The AI would interactively assess the user's level of background and begin instruction at the appropriate level, leading to the desired goal.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#5I have a backup cam on my car, I want a little wiper on it, like my windshield. Every time it rains I have to get out of my car and wipe it off with my thumb.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#6API for sports data. If you want to build a great product based on sporting data, it is crazy hard to get. I think someone that made the pipes to all sports data (stats, schedules, lines, etc) could facilitate a lot of good innovation and build a solid business.
Not sure if this is a VC scale business, but I think it should exist and I'd love to be a user if someone built it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#7A gmail application that would parse through your email (old and new) and collect all contact information without having to do this manually. Especially helpful if this can be done for older backed up email.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#8A social media, messaging, and news aggregator that screen-scrapes or otherwise accesses FB, Twitter, Instagram, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Hangouts, GMail, HN, Reddit, etc, and integrates them all into one unified interface.
This of course would violate ToS agreements and various services would try to block it. But if it ran as a local app instead of in the cloud, and it was regularly updated, it would be very difficult to block with either technical or legal means.
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#9API for sports data. If you want to build a great product based on sporting data, it is crazy hard to get. I think someone that made the pipes to all sports data (stats, schedules, lines, etc) could facilitate a lot of good innovation and build a solid business. Not sure if this is a VC scale business, but I think it should exist and I'd love to be a user if someone built it.
http://sportradar.us/
they are not cheap though
Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
#10a news aggregator that works. one where each person using it fills it with all sorts of metadata regarding why they liked/disliked a post/comment/embed etc, and then lets me use all the tagged metadata around content to sort it, possibly with some AI to help me.
slashdot seemed like it was on the right track, then the simplicity of the like/upvote threw complex out the window. buzzfeed came back with wtf/lol, but its not the same.