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Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

realproblemhunt.com

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Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#24

Post by pknerd »

Kiro wrote: post #13

So I've seen this idea in different incarnations. My favourite was probably the one that scraped Twitter for people complaining about various things and had people rank those. This seem like a decent attempt to actually make it viable though. Good luck!

I guess someone made such thing and posted on HN a few years back. I don't know URL

Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#25

Post by smacktoward »

juliangregorian wrote: post #18
kcole16 wrote: post #5

Cool idea. I especially agree with this problem: "It's hard for multiple developers to share one staging server". My company has two staging servers, but with a team of 6 devs, someone often has to wait. Does anybody know of any solutions to spin up/down staging servers in a cost-effective way?.

Partition them into VMs? Alternately, I use vagrant-aws ( https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws ) to quickly do this on Amazon. Just be very careful to not check your keys into source control.

Yeah, VMs were my thought too -- VMs are easy to spin up and cheap/free, so why bother having everyone share one staging server? Use a configuration management tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc. to make sure everyone's staging VMs are configured the same, and you're good to go.

Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#26

Post by RankingMember »

I really like the idea, but the cheeky part of me now suddenly really wants to make a parody site called "RealREALProblemHunt" where the top problems are things like "I have no access to clean water" and "First world countries keep exporting their garbage to my country's shores" as a counterpoint to the ones on this site like "Need to live to be 300 years old" and "Cannot find a place to order late night food past midnight.".

Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#27

Post by hackerews »

mfisher87 wrote: post #19
hackerews wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a community of business intelligence analysts, or a different community of data scientists, maybe another one of accountants, or a separate one of structural engineers. Each online community is invite-only, and you can talk about your trade, new/interesting solutions, and the problems you have with your software and tools. I think conferences and associates often fill this void for many industries, but it'd b…

I think this is a more viable (and beneficial to society) product than the generic RealProblemHunt site that is presented to us. The generic site is, in my opinion, vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. A more focused tool like this could help professional communities prioritize problems within their field in a public way. For example, a similar product for game developers might prioritize fixing game monetization…

Agreed. And these communities will likely bubble up from someone in it, or very close to it - not just someone building a generic platform.

Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#28

Post by eastbayjake »

I went to the site expecting to find "real" problems in the vein of "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework" or "I have to care for a sick relative but it's hard to get medical advice for small ailments", etc. Most of these just seem like problems in search of a narrowly-focused consumer internet product for upper-middle-class white people or other engineers.

That might be a feature and not a bug.

Re: Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

#29

Post by ArekDymalski »

As far as I remember the oldest attempt to create something like that was http://theinternetwishlist.com/

These sites always seem to suffer from the same problem - not enough contributing members. It's quite understandable - what is the incentive to post a problem? What is a chance that someone will solve it? When will it happen? How will I know about it? etc. All these factors result in a situation in which people rather treat such sites as an entertaining curiosity.

My suggestion to improve it is: make it an inverted Kickstarter - if I've got a problem I pledge X dollars for someone to create a solution for it. Other people with similar problem add their pledges. When the sum starts to look tasty developers pick up the challenge and compete (?) for the bounty. The backers get the solution at discounted prices. Everyone's happy and live long ever after ;)

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