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Ask HN: What will you pay for?
Yesterday, I post a list of 6 items I would pay for. I was hoping other people would chime in with problems they were having that they would pay for. So, I'm just going to ask directly: What would you pay for? Or what have you paid for recently?
- switch33 13y ago1. Grabbing data from any site by just highlighting the content and providing format rules straight to JSON. This could be a plugin for a browser. 2. A developmental IDE that targets interactive run-time development where you see results instantly. Variables would instantly turn into scrollable bars that you can set min and max to modify a running game window. (i'm working on this idea.) 3. A service that teaches me how to program distributed, peer to peer, or machine learning step by step in implementing useable already made tools. Not just blog posts or coursera courses how to teach yourself how to make them. 4. An small box that you can program to respond to text with other small parts to turn lights on and off as well as other small things around the house for automation. But not be over the internet. A simple home automation by wifi sounds safer to me. 5. A plugin for the browser that track's movements and clicks of a mouse, for later automating a specific session. Useful for automation and faking users for social sites. This would probably have to be open source since privacy is a concern with plugins that provide that much level of tracking. 6. A finance screen that pulls off data in a more use-able way that isn't just simple stock figures but gives insight into market trends. This is a general idea, but the data needs to be useful enough. Thinknum, quantopian, and quandl.com are all decent ideas that are like "half-there."
- krapp 13y ago>Grabbing data from any site by just highlighting the content and providing format rules straight to JSON. This could be a plugin for a browser Would you pay for a service that collected sets of tags from a site and returned it as JSON? Like all the links or images or script tags?
- switch33 13y agoI think a browser plugin would be the best idea. Basically you highlight something a button appears. You click that button and name the type of data. It build's a script to capture that in JSON so you can do webscraping without even needing to write any code. Then it has options to create rules for other pages similar to it as well so you can just provide a url or two and it'd update the script.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- AznHisoka 13y agoYES.. but only if that services includes the actual crawling. otherwise, it's trivial to implement.
- blooberr 13y agoWhat's missing in #6? Could you clarify on "half-there"?
- switch33 13y agoSure, Quantopian is nice. But it's only stock data in some cases. It is up-to-date. It serves well for back-testing and for managing a portfolio in a certain way using newer ideas, but real-time investing information is limited. Quandl is nice, but it is only "shared data" that people are willing to submit so it is not up-to-date. It does have the best API of the group because you can pull data from it with very few lines of code, or simply download a .csv. Thinknum is nice, they do discounted cash flow computing which is useful for investing. But theres not much there besides the balance sheets. It is a large amount of data, but it's not curated in a very digestable format. If you look at finviz you can see what I mean about more digestable information. It has green or red marks where it lists information indicating if things are good or bad that is a bit more digestable. Mutual fund inflows are what really do a lot of the work for the market, but many financial sites do not cover this data. And momentum investing seems to be very big, but it's not covered that much.
- localuser 13y agoFor 1, check out kimono. It was on show hn a while a go. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479
- switch33 13y agoThis looks close. I wonder how good it really is functioning though. I'll take a look, but it is a great idea. edit: Ok, I dunno how well this really works, but it sounds/looks rather brokenish. Actually, I think this could have been easily made not nearly so pricey though. An API is expensive for this task, it's such a general task it should be a 1 time fee. edit2: Actually this is pretty neat, but dang that price is annoying. I think anyone re-coding this idea as a plugin without a API cost and instead with a single cost but outputted the code would literally make 3x the amount of money. edit3: Kimono is broken. Just did some tests on random blogs. It is not exactly as good as it suggests. It just chose a few sites that are easy to scrape from for it's display.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- codegeek 13y agoI will/might pay for an app that can hook up to my home appliances/circuits and gives me a monthly dashboard of my utility usage broken down to individual items. For example, I want to know how much electricity I used from the bulbs in my kitchen vs bedroom. Bonus if it can tell me how to improve the cost by suggesting better alternatives. So if I use kitchen lights for 5 hours in a day and they are not energy efficient, give me options to save money. Kinda like a mint.com for utilities. I will/might pay for a smart mailbox (physical not email) that can scan my mails and tell me if I have any useful mail other than junk. Bonus point if it organizes/separates the junk mail automatically in a separate bundle than my regular/good mail. Note: You can tell that I am a homeowner. In general, a lot of home related stuff need serious fixing. So much can be done via great technology. Example: Lockitron is cool. Need more innovative things like that for home stuff. EDIT: I edited the mailbox to physical mailbox to clarify that i m not talking about email.
- switch33 13y ago"I will/might pay for a smart mailbox that can scan my mails and tell me if I have any useful mail other than junk. Bonus point if it organizes/separates the junk mail automatically in a separate bundle than my regular/good mail." I think rabbitmq, and few other mail services may do "some" of that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- argonaut 13y agoThe smart mailbox idea was attempted by a well-funded company called Outbox. They shut down last week, for insufficient demand (cost of user acquisition too high) http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/
- edelans 13y agoFor the dashboard of your utility usage broken down to individual items, check smart impulse, a french startup http://www.smart-impulse.com/ http://www.smart-impulse.com/. They do exactly this.
- AznHisoka 13y agoI'd pay for an API that could convert a twitter username or G+ id or linkedin ID to an email address with at least 20% recall, but 100% accuracy (no false positives)
- switch33 13y agoThis sounds like a good idea, but maybe the way to go would be to search for e-mail addresses from web-scraping? You can put it together from google analytics + some perl regex script to just print the e-mail addresses. Maybe the way to go would be to look for similar names on other sites as well.
- ahazred8ta 13y agochegra's original list is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7125542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7125542 1. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the ability to expand to 3072. I'm will to pay $1k for this plus the price of shipping.(Don't care if the parts are old) 2. I need to dress better. A service to pick out the clothes that I wear and should buy. Willing to pay $120 per year for this. 3. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this. 4. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this. 5. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k. 6. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.
- wikwocket 13y agoIf you are trying to wrangle some ideas for startups or profitable side projects, I think this approach is unlikely to be successful. First of all, you cannot reliably determine what someone will pay for by asking them directly. People frequently do not know what they want until they see it, do not know what they will pay for until they open their wallet, and are poor forecasters of both. Secondly, my experience indicates that the cross-section of people who post comments on HN is not well correlated with you average consumer or B2B market. Or with human beings in general, for that matter. ;)
- switch33 13y ago"First of all, you cannot reliably determine what someone will pay for by asking them directly." Sometimes people do better with "forced" creativity. By asking someone this type of question it makes them think of quicker easier ways that may make their lives simpler. Which sometimes can lead to better thought out ideas. While I agree HN's isn't the average consumer or even B2B market they are still people. . .
- argonaut 13y agoI think this is actually the absolutely wrong way to do it. By asking people what they would pay for, you often constrain your idea space to the space of "incremental ideas that sound good that lots of people have thought of," rather than explore the space of "revolutionary, new-market or market-disruptive ideas that most people think are stupid (without the benefit of hindsight)." The right approach, I think, is to build a prototype and then ask people if they would pay for that prototype, rather than forcing people to imagine a product.
- junto 13y ago1. I'd pay money for software that mimicked Google+ / Facebook, but was open source and could be self-hosted. Bonus points if it ran on my Synology. My requirements are actually quite simple. I want a place to share posts, and photos and have friends and family (predominantly family) would be able to comment on those photos and posts. It needs to look good, minimal and easy to configure. I want to get my private stuff away from the NSA vacuum cleaner. I want to take back control. 2. I'd also pay money for a sudo apt-get a-completely-simple-fully-featured-email-server-that-is-bullet-proof-by-default-and-the-only-config-is-a-domain-name(s). Ideally with a web interface. I'm praying mailpile.is will be that.
- switch33 13y ago"I'd pay money for software that mimicked Google+ / Facebook, but was open source and could be self-hosted. Bonus points if it ran on my Synology." I've seen some decentralized facebook type stuff on github. Problem is non-centralized social networks are hard to scale as well as a bit strange to use for people.
- svalorzen 13y agoIt's called Diaspora*, looks nice and I'm planning to make an account in there soon.
- junto 13y agoI have looked at the diaspora website. I didn't get it. I'm promise you I'm not that stupid but their website was a car crash. Why do I need to create an account with them? I want something as simple as WordPress. If buddypress wasn't so ugly it could be an option.
- switch33 13y agoDiaspora was a fail of a P2P service. I would not recommend it.
- junto 13y agoI don't need decentralised in terms of P2P. I just want to own the data on my server.
- shortsightedsid 13y agoI would pay for a good twitter app which helps me actually read stuff. There's so much of noise on twitter that if there was a way to filter that out, it would really be nice.
- switch33 13y agoCan you elaborate, based on what criteria? For example: Only famous people? only students? only phds? Content? Only people with blogs? Or maybe a better dashboard abstraction that can have conversations between people be easier to digest?
- shortsightedsid 13y agoRight now I use tweetdeck which allows me to see everything as columns. So I can have a column for my timeline, column for hashtags etc.. But the problem is things like - http://askaaronlee.com/how-many-times-do-you-tweet-your-blog-post/ http://askaaronlee.com/how-many-times-do-you-tweet-your-blog.... The notorious ones are inc.com, fast company or mashable which seem to repeat the same post 4-5 times a day. Plus with tools like Buffer, you can schedule those tweets to be made multiple times. What would be nice is a tool to fight back - say keep track of Duplicates and ignore them.
- switch33 13y agoHmm, that does seem like an interesting idea. I didn't think about that problem but you are indeed right. Twitter is full of re-tweets of continually the same blog post spam. I think some kind of service to monitor twitter and filter out that would improve readability.
- lsiebert 13y agoCross platform, knows what you have seen already on any device.
- jmathai 13y agoThe problem is that you can't ask people what they'd pay for and expect a valuable list. There are plenty of things I think I'd pay for but when it comes to taking out my credit card and paying for it I find something else to distract me from it.
- switch33 13y agoI read this as "People don't know what they really want something until they are shown it." While this is true in some retrospects, it's all about solving problems. If people say "they want to solve x need for their y idea" it is essentially the same as "I'd pay for x so I can solve y sooner." And in that retrospect these lists could be useful. You could try being less negative and think for 5-10 minutes on an idea rather then being a pessimist.
- ezl 13y agoI will pay for Craigslist style email obfuscation as a service. Problem: I have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public. How it works: I set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. On demand, i make an API call to your service (www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with { real_address:foo@bar.com, expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:00:00.000Z, obfuscate_replies: true / false, callback_url: (optional) } www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com responds with either: (A) a success message and an anonymized, temporary email address like 239fag72wa@mail.mysite.com (the subdomain i gave you), or (B) an error message like "no such user at that domain" or "domain doesn't exist" or something. The email address lives until the expiration timestamp. If the obfuscated email receives a message, you forward it to the "real_address". If "obfuscate_replies" was set to true at email creation time, then if the person responds, you play middleman for both parties and force all their emails to go through you (basically you create another obscured email for person who writes to the obscured email). If "callback_url" was set, that means that I, the operator of www.mysite.com, want to be notified of activity at the obscured email address, so you POST activity to the specified url. That lets me do things like update activity feeds in my app for the user. If you build this, I will pay for it. It seems to me that many other startups could use something like this as well. edit: formatting and owning up that this is me re-posting this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024718 in hopes that somebody will build this so I can pay for it.
- switch33 13y agoLike a temporary e-mail service that contacts your regular e-mail service? There is countless versions of those like 10minutemail.com or something. This could be done by running an automated script that makes an e-mail address temporarily adds it to your site. Then another script that check's said e-mail address. This is a problem with e-mail spam, but I think hiding your real e-mail from spambots is the main concern in this if I am understanding you right.
- natdempk 13y agoHe wants more than that. He wants it craigslist style, on demand from an API, and forwarding to your real email. 10minutemail.com does none of those things, and doesn't cover the other features he requested either.
- workhere-io 13y agoEmail (IMAP plus a Gmail-like web interface that is better than RoundCube). Preferably hosted somewhere safe(r) than the US.
- robbiea 13y agoA chrome extension for twitter that: 1) Tells me via a % of what type of things they post (text only vs links, vs images, etc) 2) Tweets to followers % (If someone has 10k tweets and only 100 followers, that usually means they aren't worth following IMO) 3) allows me to filter by media type on the twitter website. So, let's just say I only want to view tweets that don't have media links. I would pay about 5 dollars for that.
- switch33 13y agoNow, this is a good idea. This could also be done as a seperate website layout: I think it'd be great to rank twitter users based on criteria: How influential are they? What category best fits them in one word? And statistics: What % of tweets have text, links, images? Filtering by media type. I'd also see this as a very useful tool to pay for. If nothing else by ad revenue on the website itself. Edit: Actually I think http://www.twitonomy.com/ http://www.twitonomy.com/ or http://bottlenose.com/ http://bottlenose.com/ are pretty nice.
- Mankhool 13y agoI would pay for an RFID reader that I can attach to a DSLR that will dump data it reads into an IPTC field.
- switch33 13y agoMass credit card fraud?
- Mankhool 13y agoNo actually. I'm a MAM and my photographers often dump photos on my desk with ZERO metadata. I have no way of identifying everyone. If everyone had a name badge with an RFID then taking their photo would collect their name, title and company information. Also, do CCs use RFID?
- ahazred8ta 13y agoMedia asset manager? What industry/environment?
- ctb_mg 13y ago1. A web-based email client that's as good as gmail or fastmail, but open source, and runs on my servers. 2a. Document/file storage as good as Google Drive/Docs, that is open source and runs on my servers. Corresponding mobile app required. 2b. Open source cloud (a la ownCloud) with a better user interface and more features on both web and mobile (i.e.: viable as a Google drive replacement) 3. A mobile operating system that focuses on security and isn't too information-leaky. 4. A very nice android tablet replacement for stock headunits in cars. The key is that it should be easy to install and configure. One can create this now using torque, a bluetooth OBDII adapter, and tasker to act like a genuine headunit, but requires lots of configuration/setup.
- asselinpaul 13y ago2a https://www.aerofs.com/ https://www.aerofs.com/
- lsiebert 13y agoA career manager/mentor would be something I, as someone retraining as a developer, would pay for. Somone knowledgeable about development who helps me find jobs that match my current abilities/interests , training to increase my abilities, selks me on my abilities to companies, and perhaps provides support for things like salary negotiations and benefits. I suppose I could get some of that from a college, if I went back for a degree in CS, but it seems like school is disconnected from so many aspects of development and industry, the tools you learn are not the tools you use when working, and it is incredibly expensive with no guarantee. I want someone in tune with how things work in the real world to help me with my career, so I can focus on being good at the jobs I get, not at being good at getting jobs.