Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#91
post #68

In the age of Single Page Applications that work almost without any backend I am missing a BaaS - Backend as a Service, that would handle users (sign up, sign in, forgot password), their data (save some user generated data, load user generated data) and payment processing at the same time. Right now you could try to combine Kinvey with Stripe or Cognito with PayPal but it is not easy at all.

Firebase for everything but payments.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#92
post #68

In the age of Single Page Applications that work almost without any backend I am missing a BaaS - Backend as a Service, that would handle users (sign up, sign in, forgot password), their data (save some user generated data, load user generated data) and payment processing at the same time. Right now you could try to combine Kinvey with Stripe or Cognito with PayPal but it is not easy at all.

Can you talk about some of the challenges integrating kinvey and stripe? Seems like if you can setup a webhook on kinvey for stripe to call, that's about all you'd need?

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#93
post #8

A solution for game assets building. Ideally it would be possible to build all assets (maps, models, textures, binaries) in a game from source files to the format that's distributed to people. Unfortunately due to the build times for certain things like maps it's not feasible to rebuild everything before every release. Combined with the fact that the files are relatively large means that we can't store everything in…

Please look at https://www.plasticscm.com/version-control-for-games.html

We are. 2 man team and have our own hackeneyed way, some in house bunch of Python scripts to build our game assets. As we do this seriously as a hobby it works :). But now we are at a stage where the 2 games are coming along well and to go full hog, I would choose plastic.

It has integration with Unity and gutsync as well so migration is easy and with 7$ pm cloud plans for 5gb assets works for us.

Last when I had checked plastic it was out of reach out hobbyist / indie game devs. Hope this helps.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#94
post #66
post #28

I have a really bad memory, but the part that affects me most is inability to remember conversations, even fairly recent ones (like the day before). Just zero recall of it ever happening. I'd love a way to quickly and unobtrusively log 'talked with Able and Baker about X Y and Z at such and such time and place'. Right now all I can think of is typing it into my phone or writing in a notepad. But having such a solutio…

Kind of like the rememberance agents the early wearable computing people used? http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra.html

Something like that would be wonderful, yeah. Far as I can tell, it's not a real existing thing, right? Just an idea that there was a prototype of?

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#95
>Go wild, dream big.

I want a DNS replacement that allows you to "subscribe" to TLDs, each with their own policies and practices. Domains are identified by a tuple of a public key and the domain name, so that if someone wants to share a domain, the browser can let them select the host they want. It should have 3 (or more) distinct modes of operation: Gossip, where popular portions of the zone are continually shared between nodes; P2P, where queries traverse a graph of peers, rather than a tree; and a Classic mode, which functions as DNS does.

I want a standard way for ALL OSes (incl. Mobile) to share notifications. I can't even get my phone and smartwatch to share all the notifications I need, and they're from the same manufacturer!

I want a protocol and software to combine the paradigms of Syncthing and FTP, so you could download a folder's contents (or a subset thereof), or keep it up to date, all with syncthing's discovery and authentication framework.

I want a platform where every action is entirely scriptable in something that's not Javascript. Get an IRC message while I'm not there? Send the text to program A. New USB device inserted? Launch a virus scanner there. It would be exceedingly helpful if you could tie in to the browser and define scripting events on 3rd party pages.

Finally, I wish Plan 9 was a viable desktop OS because its protocols and paradigms line up very nicely with some of these. Plus, it's a really neat, simple OS.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#96

A peer to peer encrypted datastore that everyone can use to store their own metadata. Facebook knows what movies I like and interests I have, Spotify knows what songs I listen to, Amazon knows what books I like to read. All of these pieces of data are currently silo'd and controlled by private corporations many of which can do whatever they like with that data. I want a private encrypted datastore that does this inst…

Great idea. I was just thinking about this the other day and I too would be interested in something like this.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#97

I'd like to be able to implant a tiny subdermal body heat-powered circuit in an animal so I can track their location on a map.

Same thing, but very light weight and with a discount for buying in bulk.

(Best friend is an ornithologist.)

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#99
post #57
post #49

A browser on Linux that just works and doesn't use up all my RAM. Basically like Chromium a year ago? before they removed support for Hangouts and I had to switch to Chrome. Which crashes all the time, usually when using Hangouts.

What's broken about Hangouts? I just tried it in Chromium for Windows and it seems to work OK.

Late edit: This is a serious question. I can't find any information about Chromium dropping support for Hangouts. What happened?

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#100

I want a technology that reads and transmits blood, hormone and micro-biome information so that I can optimise nutrition, rest and training. I'd accept some form of implant but bonus points for the least invasive solution.

Medical lab technologiats are in an ideal place to start delivering this sort of information. If information and tissue/food/etc could be condensed on to small disposable chips, it could convey a lot of information.

Get sick in the stomach? Put a sample of your food on small chips before you eat and now we know that Chinese restaurant you ate at had high levels of E coli.

Post reply on HN