Is there a way to stop this flood of accelators, incubators, and web startups that add little value to the billions of people on this planet who don't care about social media, apps, or tablets? Alternatively, why don't we focus on overpopulation, cures for cancer, and real alternative energy?
HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#42Stock room inventory/management for the small and large business.
Must include Point of Sale recipe management/tracking. Counting is worthless without knowing what is leaving the store.
The problem with current "disruption" is that they think the cash register is the problem. The ability to scale and integrate back of the house management with front of the house interfaces is the only real way to disrupt the POS industry. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an industry outsider that will never really break in. aka Taking credit cards on an iphone is not disruption.
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#43Search - I'm even going to pay for it. Search for the damn terms I enter into a search field. The "app" may at most have a CSS style sheet, 1993 look. No Javascript, no images. Give me options to limit my search to date ranges, domains, urls, languages, etc. HTTPS basic auth. No cookies, no tracking, no country detection, no redirect to see what I clicked, no guessing unless I add a flag in the search field. There wa…
It's not EVERYTHING you want, but I started using http://duckduckgo.com/ about a week ago and it's probably the closest you're going to get to a useful search engine nowadays. Full keyboard usage and zero tracking. Simple and clean. I'm enjoying it thus far.
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#44Substantially increased battery life. Seems to be one of the major factors holding back energy solutions and a true explosion of mobile device use.
I think wireless power -- rather than more efficient batteries -- is the long-term solution.
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#45I would like short url encoding to be an RFC, and every browser implement it in the browser, encoding and decoding the url locally without having to query some random .ly site.
In fact, if short url encoding were an RFC, you could compress all links on your site to short, and the browser would expand them for display.
Other uses would probably reveal themselves.
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#461.) The average computer users fear of their own computer. It hurts me on a deep level (Deeper than just seeing a business opportunity.) to see the bicycle for the mind being marginalized in it's potential by people trying to sell things. (Microsoft, IBM, and co. Have probably done permanent damage to humanity by spreading the meme that computer knowledge is for 'nerds'. Whatever those are.) As we move further into the 21st century, and computers become ever more ubiquitous, it seems that computer knowledge becomes ever more scarce. (I'd have to run the numbers to be sure, but while the number of computer literate people has objectively gone up, I would think that the percentage of people with any sort of understanding deeper than the surface of point and click has gone down.)
I'm not even sure if it's a solvable problem. But if someone did it would be a great service to humanity.
2.) I'm 99% sure that this can't be solved by an external third party. But my 1% nagging doubt is enough to make me list it.
Quite simply, I have problems getting things done. It's not necessarily that I'm lazy, it's just that It takes more effort to figure out what I should be doing right now than it does to just keep procastinating on the same task. To-do lists help, but are ultimately inadequate. A pen and paper to-do list always seems to evade my attention when I try one. Writing it out in a text file usually works better, but it's still not a surefire thing. It's not necessarily that I need better to-do list software so much as it is that I need a better way to manage my time in a way that either:
A] I don't have to manually write down and erase tasks as I do them. Besides an erase shortcut I don't think that this is really feasible. Computers can't read my mind yet.
B] It will make or convince me to habitually update and read it in such a way that it's not annoying or somehow feels out of sync with my workflow.
Maybe I'm alone on this one, maybe I'm not. Maybe it's solvable, but I doubt it.
I'd just like to remind anyone who's read this far that not every problem is best solved by a start-up or business. If you feel strongly about anything in this thread you should at least consider the possibility of other methods of achieving your goals. (But being able to potentially make sizable sums of money while you do is a sweet bonus.)
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#47Search - I'm even going to pay for it. Search for the damn terms I enter into a search field. The "app" may at most have a CSS style sheet, 1993 look. No Javascript, no images. Give me options to limit my search to date ranges, domains, urls, languages, etc. HTTPS basic auth. No cookies, no tracking, no country detection, no redirect to see what I clicked, no guessing unless I add a flag in the search field. There wa…
It's not EVERYTHING you want, but I started using http://duckduckgo.com/ about a week ago and it's probably the closest you're going to get to a useful search engine nowadays. Full keyboard usage and zero tracking. Simple and clean. I'm enjoying it thus far.
Love ddg.
As you become accustomed to using their bang codes, you'll find yourself trying/guessing a new bang code because "that's what it should be," and sometimes it works. That's how I discovered my pinboard tags are behind !pb
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#48In North Korea, there are oppressed people who are brutally killed in actual concentration camps. They are taught by the government that the American people are evil. Is there a possible strategy for the U.S. to free the North Korean people from the North Korean regime without killing most of them?
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#49An alternative to incarceration or a better experience while incarcerated. Something more humane, less costly or better yet, an alternative to the current prison system that has a net positive effect on society and the economy. Apparently, there's a lot of talent locked up - what a waste: http://www.quora.com/Prisons/What-are-some-aspects-of-incarc...
It's astounding to me that the US prison system is such a snake pit. The inmates rule everything but the surface. It should be all but impossible for murder and other major crimes to happen in prison; we already know where the criminals are!
Re: HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve
#50When I'm in the grocery store, looking for an obscure item (cheese cloth is the one that made me think of this). Build me a mobile app to search and get info on where in the store the item is.
Solving a problem is often about finding the right approach / fudging the problem into something you can solve. And there is actually a disruptive solution to this: online shopping. Amazon has cheese cloth.
But they won't deliver it before dinner today.