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Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist
- DrScump 11y agoTeleportation.
- NameNickHN 11y agoCoupled with a time machine.
- jneumann004 11y agoCoupled with something that is common now, but won't be in a decade.
- DrScump 11y agoOh, and I want a pony, too.
- arikia 11y agoA functional news media.
- hanniabu 11y agoCan you expand on your definition of functional?
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoOne that tells you the truth, not just "things that are true"? For example, don't just tell us he said, and she said, and leave us to try to figure it out. Investigate until you know who's right, and why, and tell us.
- herbst 11y agoI would rather prefer the exact opposite. News that tell me the facts and then let me figure out my opinion without mentioning theirs all the time.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- michael_fine 11y agoI really wouldn't -- there are orders of magnitude more facts in the world than I have time to digest, so it certainly helps having a basis of analysis, even if sometimes that analysis is misguided.
- i2ifunding 11y agoTime control Machine
- tiredwired 11y agoTelomere lengthener thingy.
- insoluble 11y agoI've been waiting for this too. It would be better if somehow only the best performers received this update. The problem is determining which performers are doing their jobs correctly.
- ttepasse 11y agoReal life Undo
- hemling 11y agoKnowledge uploading like in the Matrix movie
- codegeek 11y agoI got a few: - Teleportation - Time Machine - Dream Recorder (as in record our dreams as we see them) - Mind Reader (as in Mel Gibson in What Women Want :))
- atmosx 11y ago> Mind Reader This is a really, really bad idea.
- imakesnowflakes 11y agoHoly shit! You just read my mind!
- gull 11y agoIs there a way to contact you?
- codegeek 11y agosure but what do you want to discuss ?
- rtl49 11y agoSorry, I don't think you'll find any free lunch here. The products I would like to see don't exist because they're not economically viable (e.g. high-quality development and mobile phone hardware using open source firmware) or they depend on technology that doesn't yet exist or doesn't scale well, etc. You may come up with a novel idea for a viable product, but no one can do this for you.
- sourcedelica 11y agoA way to get around Twitter's 800 tweet home timeline limit. Or maybe this exists already? That would be great.
- tmaly 11y agoan easy way to update your address when you move without having to make 500 phone calls
- stevekemp 11y agoMove to Finland. They have a population database which is queried by companies, such that if you move house your details are updated once, and instantly visible to companies. It's both a little disturbing, and highly useful.
- mbrock 11y agoA todo list that helps me figure out WTF to do, maybe by generating checklists from a corpus of facts, sources trusted via web of trust, social collaboration, etc. I'd input "trip to Thailand" and the service would break that down into: 1 check your vaccines 1.1 hepatitis A most important 1.2 try local clinic X, click here to dial 2 check your insurance 2.1 click here if you have home insurance 2.2 click here to purchase trip-specific travel insurance 3 decide dates 3.1 week? two weeks? month? click to specify 3.2 pick a flight, click to browse curated list And so on. (These should probably be in reverse order but I'm too lazy to change the numbers.)
- kleer001 11y agoI'm there too. A crowd sourced and trained machine learning travel agent would be phenomenal. Quite expensive too.
- imakesnowflakes 11y agoA machine that detects the toxins/harmful chemicals in food materials....
- makebelieve 11y agoA money manager. It knows all the expenses and allocates an allowance. it tells you to get a new job and to trim expenses in a sensible way. it tells you to stop buying so many clothes/books/whatever. it asks you to repeat what you are doing when you don't spend money. it makes you justify expenses before you can have money. it saves for you. I think this is possible now, when it was impossible before. it funds a debit card monthly for you, and calculates everything else. it learns you finances and then plans accordingly. most people will adapt to whatever money they have, they just suck at managing it. there isn't anyone that tells you "you can't afford that." or "you will run out of money if your lunches are so expensive" "your rent is too much money, get a better job" "you are not saving enough, what can you change so I can save you more money?" that would make life SO much easier.
- herbst 11y agoI like the idea but doubt that would work out, at least not in my environment. I think this can only work if you use your credit card everywhere and always, else you would have to write down your expenses yourself and we know nobody would do that. Then a lot of payments show up as rather generic. You would need to map a lot of "Payment Messages" to a topic, again something i think i would not do. I think i could see that working rather in a Bitcoin only environment than anywhere else. But then again, there apparently are americans who use their credit cards all the time and for everything. This might be just a american thing i cant understand.
- mbrock 11y agoThere are Europeans who use credit or debit cards for everything, too. There are also several budget managers based on that being the case. Tink is a Swedish one that I've used and it works well. It uses some Bayesian classifier or whatever to map payment codes to specific vendors, and to assign categories to vendors. When you login, it might say "we're uncertain about these 7 transactions, please classify them." In exchange for this very small amount of work, you get pie charts and trends and whatnot to visualize your spending habits. When I first tried it years ago I immediately started baking my own bread and making my own hummus every day to cut down on lunch spending. There are many consumer vendors in Sweden that don't even accept cash. Most bank offices don't handle any cash whatsoever.
- Gustomaximus 11y agoA personal life assistant at a good price. Is it realistic to get something like a 20hrs/mth retainer for like $10/hr to sort out things for me. Something that was a longer term relationship so they get to know your personality plus build trust ideally. Possibly share this assistant with friends/family. The role would be to create a 1) one stop shop that 2) gets to know you and 3) can remove small distraction tasks; like coordinate dinner with friends, monitor my emails to pay bills, find good tyres for my car, come up with gift ideas, find me a new cleaner etc.
- buzzdenver 11y ago> for like $10/hr Hey, big spender !
- AwesomeFaic 11y agoI have a habit of jumping into a new hobby/collection every 6-12 months but never know where to start since most online resources cater towards those who already know what they're doing (specifically watches in my case). I started a website hoping to address that, but it's far from finished. If there are any sites that do this already I'd love to see them!
- kleer001 11y agoA smart meta-OS, a computer butler a la Jarvis. I want a ultra-light weight daemon that sits on my network and learns what I use, when and where. Then, after getting a fair amount of data it starts to subtly suggest my next step. Say, I use Itunes every morning at 6 am for my morning run, except on Sundays or holidays. My Jarvis would see that I'm up and going outside and it's a Tuesday and get my regular playlist ready as a little icon on an unobtrusive toolbar. Or whatever it finds and figures out. Sure it would be a little clunky at first, but people tend to be regular and predictable. Also, people tend to externalize their bodily functions, fire is an external step of digestion and clothing is an external form of fur.
- insoluble 11y agoA way to sort or filter Web searches (sites, articles, posts, comments) by the IQ and or age of the person who wrote it. This would help people to minimise low-quality content. Even if the person were unknown, heuristic methods could be devised to estimate the level of intellect in a given article or post. There are various obstacles and abuses to be resolved, but it would still be nice to have a feature like this available. At the same time, I imagine that society would not currently accept such a proposition.
- dalerus 11y agoI would take a system that told me the reading level of the article before I click through.
- insoluble 11y agoIt's surprising the big search engines don't already do something this simple. Maybe a browser plugin could perform this analysis on blocks of text and append a small div at the upper right/left showing the score for each block. Perhaps it could even use things like misspellings and grammar errors as indicators of poor quality control.
- Toenex 11y agoswitch-for-me. I don't care who my household energy supplier is, I just want to pay the least each month without the hassle of monitoring my usage, comparing prices and administrating the transfer. You do it for me and you can keep a percentage of the saving.