4 ms·

Ask HN: If you had ready to use real time technology, what would you do?

23 points by andr 17y ago

Building something like Skype, Google Talk, or even Twitter is hard to do right at large scale. What real time service would you build if the technology was not a challenge?

patio11 17y ago
Nobody pays you money because you solved a technology challenge. Solve problems for people who pay money for solutions to problems. Some time later, you may run into scaling issues. You can cross that bridge when you come to it. (Or you can pay other people to cross it for you.)
- andr 17y ago
  I agree with you completely. My question is what would you build if the technological barrier of building a massive, reliable real time service was not there. Everyone is talking about the Real Time Web (even organizing conferences) but Twitter is the only near-real-time service that comes to mind.
staunch 17y ago
I'm not uninterested in building something like Skype, Google Talk, or Twitter because of the technical issues. I'm uninterested because I have no good ideas (or passion) about solving a significant problem with them. There are lots of things I'd do if you gave me technology that does not really exist. Stuff like speaker independent speech-to-text that's as accurate as an expert human could transcribe. Or language translation that was as good as an expert human. Or almost anything that let me have the power of a human brain for free (no, not MTurk).
SandB0x 17y ago
Custom reality tv. Users pay to see a day/hour in the life of another user - possibly a celebrity, though other fun people would be popular - who wears a tasteful camera strapped to their head or neck. Witness an afternoon as Michael Schumacher. What's life like as an Oxford student? My name is Joe and tomorrow I will go free running in the city - join me.
- aristus 17y ago
  psst: justin.tv Justin used to run around with a helmet camera and a laptop+ 4 bonded wireless modems in his backpack.
  - SandB0x 17y ago
    Madness! I guess my "idea" depends more on engineering advancements then. When I wrote the parent I'd just finished watching a series of the excellent Peep Show (filmed mostly via helmet cam), and I was thinking how I'd like to be able to jump into anyone's head and observe their life in that way.
    - TrevorJ 17y ago
      Being John Malkovich?
- kakugawa 17y ago
  Demand Media is prob the answer. If there's enough interest for custom reality TV, DM will pay ppl to make these videos.
nir 17y ago
"two chicks at the same time, man"
- thesystemis 17y ago
  (for those who don't know the reference: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/)
  - jksmith 17y ago
    Of course I know the reference. Sorry, but a downvote is no defense against a levity injection attack.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
zpoley 17y ago
Text to speech so that I don't have to consume realtime data like RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. while actively using a device. I'm just gonna wait for Google or someone else to solve that one.
cjoh 17y ago
I'd take on shipping. It seems to me that UPS could be in-part replaced with intelligent routing of people's ordinary daily routines.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  It's much more of a social challenge than technological one. Bruce Sterling has described a beautiful society functioning along these lines: http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko
- hop 17y ago
  Was thinking that exact thing yesterday when I had to go to the mall for last minute presents - had major crowd/chaos anxiety, turned and bailed. If Amazon could do real time shipping, it would be a miracle. Happily pay a premium for it. They could have distribution hubs in all major cities...
  - cpr 17y ago
    They're offering same-day shipping in major cities now. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200105970 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
  - rms 17y ago
    The crazed mall crowds make me anxious too but I've learned to enjoy it. How often do you get to see humans in their native habitat?
- newhouseb 17y ago
  In large cities in China they effectively have this through a million people being employed as couriers. You order something on taobao.com (kinda like amazon) and someone calls you up, asks you where you are, and half an hour later they show up on a motorcycle wherever you are and you hand over cash for your order. It's basically UPS entirely staffed by bike messengers. It's realtime and it's awesome.
ntoshev 17y ago
I've thought about making a real-time forum: basically the same thing as an ordinary forum software, but with presence capability and posts happening in real time without reloading. Or, if you look at it in another way, it would be a chat room with persistence, result is searchable, possibly threaded. The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough. The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something like Redis.
- witten 17y ago
  You've just described Google Wave. However, I think there's plenty of room in this space to come up with alternate implementations and interfaces.
  - ntoshev 17y ago
    Yes, Wave has all the features, but seems focused on collaborative editing, rich media, send and synchronize individual keystrokes etc. - so I imagine a lot of the design decisions would be different. I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to think through what you are saying.
BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
As of right now, I can find out a lot of information about a company by paying for the data from a data provider like Bloomberg or Reuters. This data, however, should be free and well-organized. I would like to build a search engine that indexes and organizes regulatory filings, investment message board posts, investment blog posts, the portion of a company's website dealing with investment relations, and economic news. You input the company's trading symbol to bring up all the relevant information about the company. Furthermore, there should be an API so that people can use the index in their own applications. I have no idea where revenue would come from.
- andr 17y ago
  Why is something like Google/Yahoo Finance not good enough? Apart from 10-K and 10-Q's?
  - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
    Have you ever used Bloomberg or Reuters? Google/Yahoo Finance are far from useful for anything but an overview of a company. The service I am talking about would be aimed at more professional users.
    - andr 17y ago
      Yes, I have used Bloomberg quite a lot, although I spent most of my time with its painful API. I just wanted to get your perspective on what Bloom feature you'd like to see in a web site/search engine.
      - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
        Well, to start, if I could get correlation data from Yahoo/Google Finance that would be a great. In addition to that, if I could get my hands easily on data concerning pending lawsuits, better industry data, and better regression tools (though this may tie in with the correlation data requested above), that would also be wonderful. Those are just a few key things that would be nice for equity. Also, the data concerning anything outside of equities is severely lacking in Yahoo/Google Finance.
rokhayakebe 17y ago
AVATAR. Plug into a clone of me and watch him do everything I think.
DaniFong 17y ago
An automatic, voice based translator: talk in one language on one end (to an iPhone or something) out comes another language and subtitles in another :-) One thing that's interesting about this is that it's not too far off. We have speech recognition technology, computer voice technology, and translation technology. They need to get better, and faster, but they're there.
ThomPete 17y ago
One that solves this http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-looking-for/ http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
tybris 17y ago
IRC

23 points by andr 17y ago

Building something like Skype, Google Talk, or even Twitter is hard to do right at large scale. What real time service would you build if the technology was not a challenge?

patio11 17y ago

Nobody pays you money because you solved a technology challenge. Solve problems for people who pay money for solutions to problems. Some time later, you may run into scaling issues. You can cross that bridge when you come to it. (Or you can pay other people to cross it for you.)

andr 17y ago
I agree with you completely. My question is what would you build if the technological barrier of building a massive, reliable real time service was not there. Everyone is talking about the Real Time Web (even organizing conferences) but Twitter is the only near-real-time service that comes to mind.

staunch 17y ago

I'm not uninterested in building something like Skype, Google Talk, or Twitter because of the technical issues. I'm uninterested because I have no good ideas (or passion) about solving a significant problem with them. There are lots of things I'd do if you gave me technology that does not really exist. Stuff like speaker independent speech-to-text that's as accurate as an expert human could transcribe. Or language translation that was as good as an expert human. Or almost anything that let me have the power of a human brain for free (no, not MTurk).

SandB0x 17y ago

Custom reality tv. Users pay to see a day/hour in the life of another user - possibly a celebrity, though other fun people would be popular - who wears a tasteful camera strapped to their head or neck. Witness an afternoon as Michael Schumacher. What's life like as an Oxford student? My name is Joe and tomorrow I will go free running in the city - join me.

aristus 17y ago
psst: justin.tv Justin used to run around with a helmet camera and a laptop+ 4 bonded wireless modems in his backpack.
- SandB0x 17y ago
  Madness! I guess my "idea" depends more on engineering advancements then. When I wrote the parent I'd just finished watching a series of the excellent Peep Show (filmed mostly via helmet cam), and I was thinking how I'd like to be able to jump into anyone's head and observe their life in that way.
  - TrevorJ 17y ago
    Being John Malkovich?
kakugawa 17y ago
Demand Media is prob the answer. If there's enough interest for custom reality TV, DM will pay ppl to make these videos.

nir 17y ago

"two chicks at the same time, man"

thesystemis 17y ago
(for those who don't know the reference: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/)
- jksmith 17y ago
  Of course I know the reference. Sorry, but a downvote is no defense against a levity injection attack.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

zpoley 17y ago

Text to speech so that I don't have to consume realtime data like RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. while actively using a device. I'm just gonna wait for Google or someone else to solve that one.

cjoh 17y ago

I'd take on shipping. It seems to me that UPS could be in-part replaced with intelligent routing of people's ordinary daily routines.

ntoshev 17y ago
It's much more of a social challenge than technological one. Bruce Sterling has described a beautiful society functioning along these lines: http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko
hop 17y ago
Was thinking that exact thing yesterday when I had to go to the mall for last minute presents - had major crowd/chaos anxiety, turned and bailed. If Amazon could do real time shipping, it would be a miracle. Happily pay a premium for it. They could have distribution hubs in all major cities...
- cpr 17y ago
  They're offering same-day shipping in major cities now. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200105970 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
- rms 17y ago
  The crazed mall crowds make me anxious too but I've learned to enjoy it. How often do you get to see humans in their native habitat?
newhouseb 17y ago
In large cities in China they effectively have this through a million people being employed as couriers. You order something on taobao.com (kinda like amazon) and someone calls you up, asks you where you are, and half an hour later they show up on a motorcycle wherever you are and you hand over cash for your order. It's basically UPS entirely staffed by bike messengers. It's realtime and it's awesome.

ntoshev 17y ago

I've thought about making a real-time forum: basically the same thing as an ordinary forum software, but with presence capability and posts happening in real time without reloading. Or, if you look at it in another way, it would be a chat room with persistence, result is searchable, possibly threaded. The hope is that conversations in such a medium would be something in between regular chat and regular forums, and they could be compelling enough. The technology is not a big issue for building this, the Tornado framework has a chat example from which you can start. Text messages are short, they can be kept in memory and saved to disk once in a while either DIY or using something like Redis.

witten 17y ago
You've just described Google Wave. However, I think there's plenty of room in this space to come up with alternate implementations and interfaces.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  Yes, Wave has all the features, but seems focused on collaborative editing, rich media, send and synchronize individual keystrokes etc. - so I imagine a lot of the design decisions would be different. I don't think I'm going to build it though - the type of forums I am interested in actually benefits from the perception that you have time to think through what you are saying.

BrentRitterbeck 17y ago

As of right now, I can find out a lot of information about a company by paying for the data from a data provider like Bloomberg or Reuters. This data, however, should be free and well-organized. I would like to build a search engine that indexes and organizes regulatory filings, investment message board posts, investment blog posts, the portion of a company's website dealing with investment relations, and economic news. You input the company's trading symbol to bring up all the relevant information about the company. Furthermore, there should be an API so that people can use the index in their own applications. I have no idea where revenue would come from.

andr 17y ago
Why is something like Google/Yahoo Finance not good enough? Apart from 10-K and 10-Q's?
- BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
  Have you ever used Bloomberg or Reuters? Google/Yahoo Finance are far from useful for anything but an overview of a company. The service I am talking about would be aimed at more professional users.
  - andr 17y ago
    Yes, I have used Bloomberg quite a lot, although I spent most of my time with its painful API. I just wanted to get your perspective on what Bloom feature you'd like to see in a web site/search engine.
    - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
      Well, to start, if I could get correlation data from Yahoo/Google Finance that would be a great. In addition to that, if I could get my hands easily on data concerning pending lawsuits, better industry data, and better regression tools (though this may tie in with the correlation data requested above), that would also be wonderful. Those are just a few key things that would be nice for equity. Also, the data concerning anything outside of equities is severely lacking in Yahoo/Google Finance.

rokhayakebe 17y ago

AVATAR. Plug into a clone of me and watch him do everything I think.

DaniFong 17y ago

An automatic, voice based translator: talk in one language on one end (to an iPhone or something) out comes another language and subtitles in another :-) One thing that's interesting about this is that it's not too far off. We have speech recognition technology, computer voice technology, and translation technology. They need to get better, and faster, but they're there.

ThomPete 17y ago

One that solves this http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-looking-for/ http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...

tybris 17y ago

IRC