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Products I Wish Existed

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#101

Post by hawski »

lisiado wrote: post #78
mdorazio wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means a much more granular pollution map than what's available at the city level. Something like being able to get accurate pollution data at sub-kilometer precision, especially in suburb areas where monitoring stations tend to be sparse.

There is a project in Germany which collects the data of stations you can build yourself with an esp8266 and a sensor. https://luftdaten.info/

Thanks for the link.

Users outside of Germany already use it. I think I will participate. For some time I was thinking about an amateur network of air pollution sensors, that seems to be it. Is there something with more reach in Europe or at least Poland (where I'm at)?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#102

Post by SamuelAdams »

dsalzman wrote: post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

>Global 2000 company IT needs.

Splunk is a good example of this. I've worked at several public and private muti-billion dollar orgs, and they all rant and rave about how good Splunk is over whatever else they were using.

So, build more splunks. Maybe something that aggregates monitoring multiple servers. A plug and play Status Dashboard for a company's internal apps. Like this: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#103

Post by acidburnNSA »

ljhsiung wrote: post #91
Daneel_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. Today’s modern reactors are night and day compared to Chernobyl/Fukushima era reactors - they’re not even comparable. They’re fail-safe rather than fail-deadly, and are much more compact and efficient, with better controls and containment. The size of the reaction chamber is basically that of a household washing machine. I’d gladly live next door to a modern plant.

Sorry for being pedantic, but do you mean fail-secure? Fail-safe = things inside the area can get out on failure. Fail-secure = things cannot get out i.e. catastrophe is contained (though people inside may die). I don't know much about reactor design, but I don't think I'd live next door to a fail-safe plant, but please correct me if I'm misguided because.

In general, fossil kills 4-6 million people per year from air pollution. Nuclear has killed ~4000 total, ever. So nuclear plants are very, very safe compared to normal energy alternatives.

Fail-safe just means that if equipment breaks or a human does something wrong, the plant goes to low power and passive natural-circulation systems kick-in that keep the low-power shutdown mode from going to temperatures high enough to break the radiation containment structures.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#104

Post by mmckelvy »

davedx wrote: post #32

> NoCode/LowCode (letting anyone build an app with a spreadsheet as a database representation) AirTable has made huge inroads here. I'm also building something in this area ( https://lightsheets.app/ ), turning slightly back towards spreadsheets instead of databases but then building enhancements and modern integrations on top. I think there's still lots of potential in this area, despite spreadsheets being 50 years…

I think building apps with spreadsheets makes sense, but to me the spreadsheet works better as the UI, not the database. In other words, you still store your data in a plain RDBMS, but you access and manipulate that data via spreadsheet formulas or custom functions.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#105

Post by acidburnNSA »

criddell wrote: post #44
Daneel_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. Today’s modern reactors are night and day compared to Chernobyl/Fukushima era reactors - they’re not even comparable. They’re fail-safe rather than fail-deadly, and are much more compact and efficient, with better controls and containment. The size of the reaction chamber is basically that of a household washing machine. I’d gladly live next door to a modern plant.

What exactly do you mean by fail safe? Are there no catastrophic failure modes? So even if a group of people with malicious intent were to gain access, they couldn't do more damage than with a natural gas or coal burning plant?

Not parent commenter, but I'll repeat what I said above to someone else about what fail-safe means in terms of nuclear reactors:

Fail-safe just means that if equipment breaks or a human does something wrong, the plant goes to low power and passive natural-circulation systems kick-in that keep the low-power shutdown mode from going to temperatures high enough to break the radiation containment structures.

Recall that coal plants and oil emissions kill 4-6 million people per year from air pollution. Nuclear plants are crazy safe compared to that. And while natural gas is safe from an air pollution POV, the hazards of climate change from it are potentially large. Nuclear reactors are essentially carbon-free.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#106

Post by polygotdomain »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #16
dsalzman wrote: post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

* I'd love to see that as well * At the same time: - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;) - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backo…

>implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part.

This 1000%. There's so much institutional friction with these projects for so many reasons; some of them political, some of them interpersonal, some of them just because someone doesn't want to. So many of these projects fail because people just don't want to work towards the goal, or simply do as little as possible and things move slower than molasses.

People don't want or care to change their processes. They do things that way because they've always done things that way. They see tools not as a way to get more done or be efficient, but as something that's "moving their cheese" and they don't like it. It doesn't matter how overworked they are by remedial tasks that could be automated, until you show them everything finished, end-to-end, working flawlessly, they won't be interested in the slightest.

The sad thing is that if there were some strong executive leadership behind these projects and they saw it as a positive thing, there could be better traction and better results. Instead, most execs look at these projects as mundane details and hand them off to whatever sad middle manager is going to take the heat for the project going south. The result is no teeth behind the initiative which even further exacerbates the issue of people not caring or lifting a finger.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#107

Post by Lucadg »

> 1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers

Dao software such as Aragon and Daostack may be the ones which make this real. A lot of the complexity in running distributed teams is connected to the sorry state of international payments. A vast majority of the potential employees is simply not able to participate to the global economy today.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#108

Post by modeless »

nrjames wrote: post #68

Purple Air hits on a bit of the neighborhood pollution sensor idea: https://www2.purpleair.com/ I've used their API to look at California wildfire data.

Their API is great. I found their site a little slow for something I want to check regularly so I built a faster one based on the API:

https://aqi.today

If there's a PurpleAir sensor near you, it will show you the reading instantly. It also updates the favicon so you can leave it open in the background and check the reading just by glancing at the tab.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#109

Post by Normal_gaussian »

siffland wrote: post #57
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I signed up to our Nextdoor (uk). There seems to be four things on here: - an avon lady over agressively spamming her stuff (blocked) - people asking for small job recommendations (who should I get to fix my garden gate, babysitter, tv ariel fitting) - some notices about local events (when / where fireworks, Remembrence, carolling) - group commiseration that one time some group was speeding all over town at midnight…

I went to sign up for Nextdoor and it wanted full access to all my contacts in my phone. I looked on their site and that is so they can invite friends from my contacts. I didn't sign up, maybe i will later, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/About-android-app-permis...

I just checked my app, it had no permissions.

I wouldn't allow it to do so, so I assume it asked, I said no, and we moved on.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#110

Post by umvi »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #100

> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch. That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul…

1984 is only a manual if the state or federal government implements it. If an HOA implements it, I don't see how that is 1984. If I turn my house into my own surveillance state, that's not 1984 either, that's me automating tedious things like looking out the window for suspicious characters or events.
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