Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experiment HN: Idea day

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#41

Post by jacquesm »

That's an excellent observation, frustration really is key to sensing where the world can be improved.

The problem is that one mans frustration is another mans income, so it would probably be easier to limit this frustration guide to those areas where you are not going to be facing opposition right away.

On the other hand that might cut off fruitful avenues and maybe we shouldn't be that timid about this.

Thanks for the idea, looking forward to that other thread and I'll do my best to think about your challenge while going through the day.

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#42

Post by prawn »

fnid wrote: post #23
kyro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jump to Conclusions Mat is a reference to the movie Office Space. It's a great movie you should check out some time.

Ugh. I know. But it's a joke and the fact that everyone there takes it seriously means they aren't serious. It's a waste of time. If the site is trying to be a funny place to go talk about stupid ideas, then it succeeds, but if it's trying to be a serious place to talk about real ideas, then it fails. That's all I'm saying.

Exactly. If you want a jokey ideas site, there's the Half-Bakery. With this ideas site, I was hoping for HN but covering spare ideas alone.

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#43

Post by philjr »

lliiffee wrote: post #10

Finding doctors is a huge problem. When you move to a new city, you are given a list of 2000 PCPs and told to pick one (after calling around to see if they are accepting new patients). When you need to see a specialist, you are given a referral. People in the health care industry know that many of the specialists are untalented losers who push patients in and out as quickly as possible, and would never let someone cl…

Not US centric, but http://www.revahealth.com/

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#45

Post by nuba »

dpcan wrote: post #36
yosho wrote: post #14

a lot of problems can't really be fixed with software... - corporate meetings that accomplish nothing - nagging girlfriend - traffic congestion (well maybe some software here might help) - stupid shitty and cold weather - an IT department that's incompetent - annoying neighbors - etc... If only software solved everything.

Well... PROBLEM: corporate meetings that accomplish nothing SOFTWARE: Collaboration software. If everyone is informed, meetings don't have to happen. PROBLEM: nagging girlfriend SOFTWARE: Tweet often and have them sent to her phone. All she really wants is a leash, this should do the trick. PROBLEM: traffic congestion SOFTWARE: I already check my city's online webcams of traffic before I have to go somewhere congeste…

>PROBLEM: corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

Well, I work from home, meetings happen on IRC or conference calls. Now, this being news.ycombinator.com, remember that when you launch your own startup, being "the boss" gives you the power to summon and dispel meetings at will! :)

>PROBLEM: nagging girlfriend

High-maintenance relationships aren't a fact of life, they're choices. It's only a problem if you want it to be.

> PROBLEM: traffic congestion > PROBLEM: stupid shitty and cold weather

Telecommuting make these seem a lot less threatening :)

> PROBLEM: an IT department that's incompetent > PROBLEM: annoying neighbors

Well, I don't really have a solution for these. Sometimes you just gotta work with less-qualified-than-we'd-hoped-for people, and you also gotta live somewhere.

I take those as facts of life, and then you have to decide what mindset you'll take on when dealing with those "problems".

Realizing you too can be annoying and also incompetent in a number of things can surely add some perspective do it.

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#46

Post by prawn »

yosho wrote: post #14

a lot of problems can't really be fixed with software... - corporate meetings that accomplish nothing - nagging girlfriend - traffic congestion (well maybe some software here might help) - stupid shitty and cold weather - an IT department that's incompetent - annoying neighbors - etc... If only software solved everything.

Group birthday cards where there's always a few people secretly signing the card a couple of minutes before it's given to the guest of honour...

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#47

Post by petervandijck »

PostOnce wrote: post #40

How about a global effort to achieve post-scarcity? (The quicker the better.) Before I go on with the steps, let me remind you all how far we've come in the past fifty years: We have the internet. All electronically-reproducible data is now virtually post-scarcity. We are also on the cusp of everyone owning a high-performance personal-fabrication machine. Twenty years from now, You will be printing (or pirating) all…

Step 1 cannot be done. Step 2 is very, very hard. Step 3 cannot be done.

Good luck :)

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#48

Post by nuba »

How surprising that no reply mentions a child-like approach to the world: curious, inquisitive, playful, fun-seeking.

I believe the simple and sad reason most people won't recognize problems or unaddressed issues around them is because they've been trained not to.

It's called "education", and is a double-edged sword. It'll take you places, but then it'll take places away from you, too, if you're not aware. The very places you need to "think out of the box".

The brain will stick with "what works" and "what's often used", but great insights and breakthroughs don't come from the masses, but rather from individuals exploring the less-traveled paths.

As Pablo Picasso says, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

Funny things, a child asks "why? why? what if?" and most people won't pay attention. Then a bearded grownup asks "why? why? what if?" and gets to be called a visionary!

Have fun!

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#49

Post by bemmu »

1) Wanted to quickly test something with a Japanese IE6, after a few hours still haven't done it. Had to evaluate VMWare, Parallels etc. and also hunt for suitable image. Too much work and too costly for just a simple check.

2) If I want to play some new game at 30+ fps, what kind of machine do I need to buy?

From a friend:

1) Printer didn't work. They never do.

2) Too cold to be outside.

3) Takes too long to know if your recombinant bacteria genetic modification failed or not.

Re: Experiment HN: Idea day

#50

Post by megamark16 »

bayareaguy wrote: post #37

Unknown or expired link. This should be fixed.

I was going to say that there are several Firefox plugins to check links on the page for you, but the ones that I took a cursory glance at look like they could really slow down your browsing, or automatically "click" on links (like Delete or Upvote/Downvote) that you really don't want them to click.

So I see now that this problem is indeed a little more complicated then that. What we really need is a plugin that makes a quick query to a central service every time you hit a page and checks to see if anyone else has "reported" bad links on that page, and if they have it will highlight them or cross them out for you. Or it could send a list of all of the links on a page to the server and check them against the servers bad links list. Other than that it will let you do your own thing until you hit a bad link on a page, at which time it will look back at your history and see what page the bad link exists on and "report" that bad link/page to the central server so that any other user that hits that page will know before they click that that particular link is bad. There would be, of course, numerous privacy concerns, but I think that if a company was willing to really "do no evil" and could garner enough user support to make it effective this could turn out to be really helpful.

Thoughts?

Post reply on HN