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Products I Wish Existed

blog.eladgil.com

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#331

Post by dlgeek »

xvector wrote: post #309
secabeen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable". Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really…

> Is there something I'm missing here? Yes. If Ring had even the barest shred of ethics, they would client-side encrypt the videos stored in their cloud. It would use no extra space. The user would have to explicitly approve the decryption and sharing of videos. But they don't, because being able to access and datamine those videos is a huge money-maker for them. Ring is terrible, but their engineers willing to imple…

And then the second someone lost their phone, their camera becomes worthless and they can't view their videos.

The average user can't be trusted to manage client-side encryption keys reliably.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#332

Post by floatboth »

jariel wrote: post #222

#4 is disturbing. Humans in large swaths (most?) of the world live without stealing from one another. Safe communities are not built on policing and monitoring (or guns), they're built by people who have basic communitarian values, basic education, who are conscientious, honest etc.. Obviously, macro issues are important (jobs, economy, credible judicial/civic systems) and that's part of the equation. But none of thi…

Defense contractors and longevity are also disturbing. Rich pervert vibes. The latter always reminds me of Jeffrey Epstein wanting to cryo freeze his head and penis (LOL) and Larry Ellison's foundation dedicated to longevity — "namely, his": https://youtu.be/bNfAAQUQ_54?t=993

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#333

Post by dstroot »

Plyphon_ wrote: post #31
rtkwe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (an…

I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs, etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents as you typed. So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and drop it into the message. It worked fr…

AWS just introduced Kendra to do the same thing. They will likely suffer the same concerns. Google had a search appliance that I thought was a brilliant idea but never got much traction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#334

Post by [deleted] »

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #226
dsalzman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?

[deleted]

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#335

Post by romwell »

ckosidows wrote: post #248

#2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it. 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the activit…

>there are only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs on

I don't consider myself an extreme socialite, but as someone who has lived in 3 states in the US and whose friends are scattered around the world after getting a degree here, this sounds really, really, really perverse.

That said, most of my use of Facebook is not to keep tabs on the people I care about (a lot of them don't use Facebook much, if at all).

The product that the OP described already exists: it's called a chat room (IRC channel, Skype group chat, Telegram channel, Whatsapp group chat, etc).

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#336

Post by 80386 »

davedx wrote: post #200
mmckelvy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe... but a regular spreadsheet doesn't map very well to a RDBMS due to its variable and flat structure. It might map to a column data store like Cassandra I guess, wonder if anyone has looked at that? What I'm working on though is more about taking the core of existing spreadsheets and building powerful integrations on top of it. Like in the sibling comments, building a webapp, or something else. I really think t…

What about a spreadsheet program that can be scripted with Javascript?

JS is nice because all you need to write it is a text editor and a web browser, both of which just about all computers have. I had an entry-level job that involved a computer once and automated a lot of the painful stuff with JS - I bet that if more people knew JS, more people would do the same.

I don't know if that'd be a good business proposition, but I think it could be a good on-ramp.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#337

Post by zorpner »

polygotdomain wrote: post #106
NikolaNovak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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 inter…

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.

Will they be paid more for the increase in productivity?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#338

Post by swyx »

wpietri wrote: post #297
jbigelow76 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No disagreement here. I just recall that guy being comically pompous (see also his penchant for carrying both a "day iphone" and a "night iphone") at the time Path launched.

Wow, what is it with anti-social people starting social networks? I long ago lost track of my collection of ridiculous quotes from the Friendster guy. But I still remember him being outraged that people were using it wrong by creating profiles for abstract things they loved (cities, parks, stores, brands) and then friending them. Like, buddy, when your users find new ways to use your product, run with it . Instead, h…

wasnt inability to scale a part of it tho? we didnt know how to architect for eagerly connected graphs then.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#339

Post by monch1962 »

wpietri wrote: post #298
dsalzman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob i…

If you haven't used it, Google Sheets is worth looking at closely. It's good for collaboration (within the boundaries of a "normal" spreadsheet interface), and has a lot of options for integrating with external systems
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