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Products I Wish Existed

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Re: Products I Wish Existed

#401

Post by cyborgx7 »

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…

To some anti-social people, building a social network might seem like a solution to make social interactions more manageable.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#402

Post by specialist »

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…

We basically did that for healthcare (electronic medical records) in the mid 2000s. Our customers (actual users) loved us.

Like your enterprises, no hospital (or equiv) would consider exfiltrating their data.

So our gear was physically deployed and operated on each hospital's own system. Our marketing and sales goons called this our "federated data model", which had no tangible connection to reality.

I likened the experience to building model ships in a bottle, while wearing mittens, while someone is punching you in the face. To mitigate, we created what would now be called CI/CD pipelines. We managed 100s of deployments with near zero downtime and effortless rollbacks. I'm rueful just thinking about it.

This strategy didn't survive the 2008 economic crash.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#403

Post by rtkwe »

PhilipA wrote: post #388
dstroot wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google Search Appliance was used by thousands and thousands of big corporations - so to say it didn't get much traction is not correct. For many years it was the defacto solution for enterprise search solutions.

Huh, I basically never really heard of it being used. Guess that's the trick with 'enterprise solutions' outside of explicitly looking for it or it popping up on an aggregator like HN or /. (since this was starting in the mid '00s) you don't really hear about them.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#404

Post by patrickk »

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…

There are multiple, mature products in the "enterprise document management" space that work similarly to the product that you describe, available on premises and in the cloud[1]. There's also (smaller, specialised) consulting companies that show how to implement these products into a business. There's some really nice features like robust OCR, meaning after scanning, you can search immediately for document metadata, like invoices numbers- for companies that insist on having paper documents as part of their processes, or crusty old management that refuses to have digital signatures.

The challenge is the same as the main topic of this thread- change management. You have to force employees to manage their documents exclusively within this system rather than dumping everything into shared drives and using Outlook attachments for everything.

[1] One example: https://www.alfresco.com/ecm-software/document-management

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#405

Post by ctdonath »

umvi wrote: post #266
ctdonath wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some form of enforcement must be available to the HOA. Otherwise I'd sow wheat in my yard and raise a gaggle of chickens starting tomorrow.

My neighbors (Maryland) have had a broken down car in front of their house for 2 years now. I see HOA violation notices on it every once in a while threatening to get it towed if they don't fix it, but nothing ever comes of it.

And every year we see news stories of HOAs inducing foreclosures etc on owners for $10 late dues, flying national flag, or painting a porch the wrong shade of white.

Gov't/HOA involvement & enforcement varies wildly. This subthread regards those thinking "1984" was a good idea.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#406

Post by Corrado »

jborden13 wrote: post #353
romwell wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 mu…

Reminds me of Google+ circles

I really liked the idea of Google+ circles. Creating "containerized" groups of people (things?) that I could act on in a complete unique way was really cool. I could say something in my "friends" circle that I couldn't (or would be misunderstood) in my "family" circle. I could also keep track of technology (Linux, Tesla, etc.) in another, completely separate, area.

I wish that a "social" network would bring back the idea of Circles.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#407

Post by deadmetheny »

Jedd wrote: post #270
deadmetheny wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nuclear reactors don’t scale down very well. The economics really break down under about 10MW which is ~5,000 times more power than most homes need. This is true and fully agreed. Home reactors are not really feasible or even a good idea. >Even ultra cost efficient full scale powerplants are a money losing proposition without huge subsidies. They are being squeezed between extremely cheap renewables, low cost natura…

> Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future yet. This is a common trope. I can't work out where you live…

I worked in the nuclear power in the past. The massive volumes of red tape involved is not conjecture, I experienced it firsthand. Activists will stonewall any new construction, full stop, and the NRC requirements for existing plants only go up over time.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#408

Post by ckosidows »

Budabellly wrote: post #319
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…

Dunbar's number seems relevant for this line of thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Thanks for this. I'd never heard of it.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#409

Post by herval »

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…

Path?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#410

Post by herval »

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…

Every other week, someone releases a version of spreadsheet-as-database on Product Hunt. This is one of those “sounds great for engineers” memes, that’s actually not that high demand IRL

source: I made one myself (and know the founders of others)

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