8 ms·

Things I still can't do in November 2014

80 points by imd23 12y ago

mkaroumi 12y ago
"Liked" 6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). There's actually a new Swedish startup (I'm not a part of it) that does exactly this! https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE "LaundryOnline is a swedish startup created to make ur day more awesome by taking care of ur laundry. We pick up and deliver ur laundry fast and easy." Seems cool!
- diziet 12y ago
  Washio does this in SF as well (I've been a happy user) 12. Get a qualified guitar / piano / cello teacher to come to my house without randomly calling people on craigslist or doing general google searches. 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. Both of these are possible with the right apps~
  - mkaroumi 12y ago
    Cool, thanks for the info. There's always "an app for that"
  - stefan_kendall3 12y ago
    They also operate in DC apparently. It was significantly less expensive to not meet the weight minimum and pay extra vs. use the hotel laundry service.
jokoon 12y ago
first world problems of somebody living in the silicon valley ? sorry but most of those things either stems from politics or lack of market development.
- octatone2 12y ago
  Or just dumb ideas. Call the police from an app? Your phone is still a phone ...
  - ntietz 12y ago
    While it's easy to call emergency services by 911, it's more difficult to call, say, the local sheriff's office for something that's not an emergency especially when you're traveling. An app could help solve that and resolve the best non-emergency number for you in your current location.
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      Establishing a non-emergency number is not hard. Dial 101 in the UK and you're put through to your local police force: http://www.police.uk/contact/101/ http://www.police.uk/contact/101/
      - ntietz 12y ago
        In the US and Canada, apparently you can also call 311 for non-emergency calls (whereas 911 is for emergencies).
    - antr 12y ago
      http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/about-112 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/about-112
      - M2Ys4U 12y ago
        112 is an emergency number, though.
        k-mcgrady 12y ago
        In the UK we have 101 for non emergency police and 999 (or 112) for emergency. I think 111 does a non emergency call to the health service where they will listen to your problem and give you advice (ambulance, doctor the next day, your fine etc.).
fphhotchips 12y ago
I remain frustrated that world financial systems are unable to handle instant money transfers between institutions. There seems to me to be no good reason that I shouldn't be able to transfer money between my accounts without waiting until midnight for the funds to clear. Worse, the routine seems not to run on weekends. Why is this? Is power unavailable on Saturday night?
- dasil003 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is to enable an acceptable level of fraud protection. Within some countries (UK) it is more or less instant most of the time.
  - tomblomfield 12y ago
    Since 2008 the UK, the Faster Payments Service[1] on infrastructure run by Vocalink[2] enable bank-to-bank payments that usually clear in a couple of seconds. This should work 24/7, depending on the sending and receiving bank. Many banks will "soft post" the payment during the day in a mirror ledger, and then run overnight batch processes to "hard post". Of course, their batches only run on business days. Because there's no-one around at the weekend to crank the handles on the machines...? I'd expect to see Faster Payments rolled out in the US in the next 5-7 years. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VocaLink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VocaLink
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      The latency still isn't good enough with FPS. I still have to wait until COB the next working day to transfer money from my building society to my bank account :(
    - jacques_chester 12y ago
      The oral history is that the UK's systems were built by Australians, because we and the kiwis have had this level of convenience since the late 90s.
sgt101 12y ago
1) Make everyone else do what I want, for free. 2) Discount the cost of other peoples investment (capital and social) to zero. 3) Never have things go wrong. 4) Magic.
- stefan_kendall3 12y ago
  My advice is worth money, but things I want should be free. ...okay bud.
skrebbel 12y ago
All of these score 1 on one of my favorite HN comments, the Yudkowski Ambition Scale[0]. That's OK, but it's a bit disappointing for a post that clearly tries to come off as visionary. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702
- caseyohara 12y ago
  You're right that none of these ideas are ambitious, but that's exactly the point. The list is "Things I still can't do in November 2014".
  - skrebbel 12y ago
    Yeah ok. I must've not had my coffee yet.
- netcan 12y ago
  These are both kind of like brainstorming tools, ways of thinking about ideas. Your tool encourages one to aggrandise an idea, which can be useful. This encourages trivialisation an idea, which can be useful too. I think doing both at the same time is a sort of essential entrepreneurial doublethink. Ideas, products, inventions and such are surprisingly (very surprisingly, to me) hard to place on that Yudkowski Ambition Scale. The line between trivial and revolutionary is surprisingly blurry. I think one could argue or tweak several of these to be in the 2-5/6 range. At least they could to the extent that they can be argue to be a 1. 1. Get a blood test simply, myself, without going to a lab, and get the results overnight. If you extend this past just bloods, combine this with DIY diagnostics tools, 23andme, items 5, 16, 31... I'm sure you can arrive at a sort of preventative medicine something something new paradigm. A Yudkowski 3? 2. Build a house myself using standard small interchangeable parts like legos. Revolutionize town and cityscapes, quarter the cost of our single biggest purchase.... Yudkowski 3, I think. Even Yudkowski's 1 & 2 could arguably be 3-5s.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  That's hysterical! I like how the transhuman stuff starts at (6), the potential existential risks at (7), and by the time you get to (10) you're literally more ambitious than God. Of course, there needs to be an analogous scale for controlling the outcomes of developing anything that ambitious. And a choir that you can hire to follow you around singing the necessary Ominous Latin Chanting while you announce your ambition levels.
hakankibar 12y ago
6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). We do exactly that :) http://temizlikyolda.com/ http://temizlikyolda.com/
- Spidler 12y ago
  It's oldstyle in London too. Lockers in the basement, lock your laundry in, send a mail off, and get them delivered in time. Works brilliantly.
beartime 12y ago
boring! 1. jetpack 2. real hoverboard 3. immortality
frtab 12y ago
Some of those already exist, and some of those should never exist.
Omniusaspirer 12y ago
Most of these revolve around non-tech industries having horrendously bad tech/web presence. Laundry, musicians, hospitals, government, banks- all of these are extremely traditional fields with many of them mired in incredible amounts of regulation. Hospitals are particularly embarrassing- even just moving to electronic records is taking them over a decade and ~100 billion dollars to do. Many hospitals are still fighting the transition heavily despite every estimate I can find pointing to massive cost savings several times the initial expense. Unfortunately I suspect we'll all be waiting a long time for even basic conveniences like home blood drawings, let alone cheap MRI's. http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.long http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.long
S4M 12y ago
> 6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). Isn't this what HomeJoy is doing? If not, I have a friend who tried that, but failed. I'd be happy to forward his details. > 9. Send $10,000 to my caretaker in France and have her get the cash and withdraw it from an ATM that same day. Within Europe, you can. > 10. Get investors for my startup by advertising the stock offering on the web and selling shares directly. Isn't that what KickStarter does? > 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online. I think it's better that you can't divorce that way.
- swombat 12y ago
  > Isn't that what KickStarter does? And a whole bunch of other crowdfunding sites in the UK - Crowdcube, Seedrs, etc. I don't know what the equivalents are in the US, but I'm sure they exist...
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> Isn't that what KickStarter does? No you can't offer a % of your company as a reward on Kickstarter. I think AngelList is probably closest with syndicated deals.
- jotm 12y ago
  On 9. - you can't just send or withdraw $10,000 - you need to go to the bank, declare the purpose of this transfer, sign some papers and then wait a few days for it to be cleared. The limit varies between countries. Money laundering laws and all that. Some banks actually decline large withdrawals (but not transfers) if you have a weak/suspicious reason ("I want to buy five 3D LED TVs today" :-)).
- pmontra 12y ago
  Transferring money across countries in Europe (and even across different banks in the same country) is not that fast. Maybe it takes a couple of days. Doing it with PayPal is probably the closest thing to instantaneous transfers. However actually getting those money out of the bank or PayPal as banknotes is more difficult. The times when banks and states where letting go the money in their vaults are long gone. Larger greeds and larger debts mean that there are de facto limits to how much you can cash out per day. I don't even want to think about what I should go through to get 10,000 EUR in cash at my bank.
sup 12y ago
> 21. take a picture of any object and find out where to buy it (Shazam for things) Like Amazon Firefly.
- eterm 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure that many of these problems could be "solved" by hiring a personal assistant type person to do things like find out where to buy something or coordinate his dry cleaning. But it sounds like this person is incredibly self entitled and wouldn't pay for that.
gordaco 12y ago
Honestly, I find some of these points quite disturbing. And a lot of them are not a matter of technology. 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. I don't want to work with you, ever. 40 hours a week are for the team, sure, but during the remaining 128 you don't have any business in my life. What you propose is creepy. 25. Be able to take a course online and get graded -- and get a diploma that means something. Education is really ripe for disruption: Coursera is OK, but we need to invent Stanford 2.0 For a diploma to mean something, what you need is not to make the courses better, or harder to pass, or whatever you're thinking; what you need is to convince your employer that you have the required skills for your job. The diploma may or may not have something to do with it, but in any case it's your employer's criterion. What you want may happen over time, but it's definitely not a matter of technology. 26. Be able to sell my advice online. It's worth something and I should have some way to monetize it. Again, it's other people, not you, who will judge whether your advice is valuable. Aside from that, it's not like it's difficult to become some kind of consultant. 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers. What. 31. Be able to get a $100 MRI. It can be done for this price. There are a LOT of things that will cost you far, far, far more than what they cost [EDIT: to clarify, that I mean is: far than what they cost to your provider]. This is pretty basic economy, IMHO. Also you may get it for free when you actually need it, if you live in a place with a sane health system (i.e., not the USA). But yeah, as jokoon said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325, most of those "problems" arise from politics and economy. I suspect that a few of them have actually been tried, and either they're doing fine but in a local scale, or they failed.
- lingoberry 12y ago
  Regarding 30. wasn't it recently concluded here on HN that obese people actually end up costing less to society since they tend not to survive into their 80s/90s? Not that his thought is good even if this was not true.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    An obese person costs more per year but less per lifetime since he dies sooner. Correspondingly, an obese person should pay more each year but they will pay less over their lifetime.
ElectricMonk79 12y ago
> 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers Perpetuating the myth that unhealthy people are a financial and social burden. That's wrong because.... * MIND QUAKE: Fat people are 'on average' healthier!! * Why? Because they clutch their heart and die in an instant. 'Healthy people' drag their boney carcasses from care home to care home for decades. Do the world a favour - grab yourself a beer, a burger and some cigarettes. Knock yourself out; literally.
- gordaco 12y ago
  I don't think I buy it, do you have some references? There are a lot of nonfatal chronic illneses derived from obesity, alcohol consumption and tobacco. My biggests problem with this point are not related with the veracity of his implied statement, but rather, with the slippery slope of making people pay more because of health problems (that are actually less in their control than we may believe), which is anyway happening already in an indirect way; and also, that it would constitute another form of poverty tax, considering that obesity is often caused by the poor quality food that people with little to no money can afford.
  - ElectricMonk79 12y ago
    http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/healthcare/fatties-and-smokers-save-the-nhs-money/ http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/healthcare/fatties-and-smokers... > Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000. And as Kip Viscusi has pointed out, when you add in the costs of the state pensions that those who die young don’t get, smoking and gorging save the government vast sums of money.
    - gordaco 12y ago
      Thanks. Quite a surprising finding. That article links to another one from the NY times [1], with this interesting line: The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...
estebank 12y ago
> 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers Am I the only one finding this insulting, disgusting and backwards? People can be overweight for a multitude of reasons, some of which are: * Genetics * Medication * Health conditions * Smoking * Enviromental reasons * Lack of sleep * Age * Pregnancy * An inactive lifestyle coupled with high consumtion of lipids You want the government to spend less money in fat people? Make the government first invest money to avoid having an epidemic of overweight people. Some people have reasons other than stuffing their faces for being fat. It'd be impolite of me to say what I think of this person for implying there aren't.
- jwdunne 12y ago
  Medication resonates with me strongly. A lot of anti-psychotics increase appetite massively and are known to cause weight gain. I remember I was larger than I'd ever been and I'd got to that point very quickly. A "fat tax" could very well hit some of the most vulnerable citizens. People with severe, long-term psychotic illnesses who are prescribed neuroleptics long-term and are unable to work comes to mind. Perhaps making healthy foods more accessible than unhealthy foods is a better place to start. In the UK, for example, I could buy much more processed food stocked full with sugar than I can fresh vegetables for the same price.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I can see something like this making a little sense in a country with 100% free health cared paid by taxes. If you have a disease you've caused yourself (by smoking, taking drugs, eating badly) why should everyone else have to help you through their taxes? That's not my opinion though, I don't think that's how it should work but I guess that's how he's looking at it.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Well, smokers already pay more (e.g, 80% of the price of a pack in France is taxes, and many other countries have similar rates). Sugar taxes are also appearing in some countries.
bcardarella 12y ago
#12 is trying to be solved by learnivore.com
crdoconnor 12y ago
"Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers" This argument seems to be pretty common among the glitterati from Wall Street. I wonder why they don't see the incredible irony.
- ue_ 12y ago
  Not that I agree with the quote but, can you explain the irony?
  - jboynyc 12y ago
    Wall Street's irresponsible behavior -- several orders of magnitude more irresponsible than making the wrong dietary choices -- cost the American public quite dearly around 2008, remember?
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    Bailouts and ZIRP facilitating and propping up the great American casino which he was a part of cost trillions of dollars. That isn't even counting the many Americans who have been scammed via their mortgages or 401Ks. I'm not sure what fat people cost the taxpayer. Given that they typically pay their own medical expenses, I would guess not a lot. Also, clearly their sad state of affairs is due to the quirky American agricultural and food processing industries. France doesn't have this problem with obesity and neither did the US in 1970. I don't see him crying out for a special tax on Monsanto. Maybe because his portfolio would take a hit. Either way, this facebook post is pretty representative of the inhuman views that American neo-royalty holds.
  - myg204 12y ago
    Maybe because wall street was deemed "too big to fail" and propped up with billions upon billions when it collapsed?
- anw 12y ago
  I agree. This is also a bit of a slippery slope. My 2 previous jobs offered health coverage that included gym membership discounts. This is a proper motivator [for me]. If I want to maintain and improve my health, I'm offered the benefit of doing so with perks. But what advantage does it give to those who have something such as a heart condition that won't allow them to participate in the same exercises? In this case, diet could be the helping factor. Then do these people get a refund on part of their grocery bill? The problem is trying to create cookie cutter solutions to people that are diverse and have complex issues.
Beltiras 12y ago
Much of this list is things you can do with a little ingenuity. ER problem is US specific. Scandinavian countries don't have that problem (to name 1st world countries that have "solved" HC). What does he want to test via blood? There are a lot of specific solutions available. Some would argue he should buy a Tesla and that's that on the car front. And then there's just the stupid stuff like "call FD with an app"..... cuz 911 is soo hard to remember. And the gross misunderstanding of Bitcoin. The value fluctuates. That's any currency, not just Bitcoin. Even the value of the dollar is volatile (inflation). He couldn't find a physicist to teach him GR? That's so amusing it brought me to tears. Did he try .... a local university? The invasion of privacy he calls for is .... disturbing. If he can get MRI's done @ 100$ per pop, he's got a business to run and money to make. Go do it! I could go on tearing that list to shreds.
netcan 12y ago
18. Invest $10,000 in Uber in the secondary market by buying some shares from an existing shareholder -- with just a few clicks. If this one gets solved, it would be weirdly ironic. That's supposedly what public markets are for. This BTW, is one an entrepreneurial government could tackle.
sarhus 12y ago
> 22. have all my accounting being done as a SASS. In UK that's done by Crunch (http://www.crunch.co.uk/ http://www.crunch.co.uk/)
rdc12 12y ago
Most of these seem possible and some of them are really creepy take this for example [1], first off that would be unmanagable list, allready exists (dating services, tinder, etc) and is presented in a very dodgy way. [1] "27. Be able to see a list of all single people in LA right now and efficiently sort through this data, with two way opt-in, to find an ideal match"
peterkelly 12y ago
> 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online. Umm... really???
vermooten 12y ago
"32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It's ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+." You can. It's called 'living in Europe.'
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  You even quoted the part where he says "the system". He's talking about total costs, including to the government. Rightly or wrongly, he believes there's room to dramatically lower actual health care costs.
nikcub 12y ago
> 26. Be able to sell my advice online. It's worth something and I should have some way to monetize it. It is called Google Helpouts[0], and it isn't going very well. Reason why - almost everybody overvalues what their advice is actually worth. People who can provide value usually already are through their usual economic activity - be it a job or entrepreneurialism (ie. If your advice was worth something, you'd already be monetizing it). Websites that create Shingy[1] As A Service type markets around paid advice often just become cesspools of psychics and webcam sex operators. [0] https://helpouts.google.com/home https://helpouts.google.com/home [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3
- netcan 12y ago
  There have been a bunch of attempts. I think that one might eventually succeed. The problem is the difficulty in actually figuring out who's advice is worth what & where. But, in many cases 30 minutes with the right person could be incredibly valuable. Technical/scientific/engineering expertise is one are, industry knowledge is another one. I think the second might be the most important. Say you have some sort of awesome technology that you want to market to the hotel industry. You need to understand how that industry works. What software they use & how. What they pay for various things. The right person could get you months ahead in 30 minutes.
  - madeofpalk 12y ago
    The problem is the same as why Freelancer, ODesk and the rest suck so much: majority of the good designers already have full-time jobs. People who have valuable advice worth paying for are usually already being paid by their employer.
  - cgio 12y ago
    Have you seen 10eqs? http://www.10eqs.com/ http://www.10eqs.com/
- Kiro 12y ago
  There's a difference between personal tutoring and general advice. I believe he meant the latter. Like for example paying to see this kind of list.
jsnell 12y ago
> 4. Locate where my dog is right now using a barely noticeable GPS chip. > 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. I think we can kill two birds with one stone here. Your team is collared, right?
- glenra 12y ago
  #13 seems easy and there exist apps for it. Not that the team would WANT to do this, but if you had a sufficiently compelling use case the problem doesn't seem difficult. For instance, if everyone on his team carries a smartphone (iOS or Android) they can all install google+ and turn on background location sharing so he can see them on a map. https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3302509?hl=en https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3302509?hl=en There's also Apple's "Find My Friends" cloud feature, and a bunch of 3rd-party apps that do the same. If they don't carry a cellphone then...um...give them one and tell them to carry it. :-)
pmontra 12y ago
Most of the points are about scarce resources that must be retrieved using a specialized network of experts. If a company has to build a solution, there must be a market large enough to make it profitable in the long run. If no, we need some crowdsourced enterprise similar to what OpenStreetMap did for maps or Wikipedia did for general knowledge. Some random thoughts on some points that stand out more for me. There are tools for 4, but non barely noticeable. There are problems with batteries too. 13 is disturbing. I won't work with him and he probably won't be willing to hire me. 14 would be great but I'm afraid paper and pencil are still the best tools if we want to trust the results of an election and keep ballots anonymous, notwithstanding a lot or research on the subject. I won't trust any solution with an IP header that can be traced to me or with a database that could receive fake votes. At least in physical elections parties can send their representatives to polling stations and check if anything strange is going on. 29. Indoor Maps from Google is tackling that problem. Probably they are not the only ones working on that. Getting 31 for free is pretty common in Europe and probably in other areas of the world. That's not a matter of being in 2014 but of where one lives.
krc5kz 12y ago
I could see Theranos trying to solve #1
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
shruubi 12y ago
The fact that this guy seems to want to be able to track his teams physical location, sell his advice for a large sum of money and be able to get quick divorces tells me this isn't the kind of person I want in any kind of real power...
thomasfoster96 12y ago
I'm sure 30 is probably best achieved by putting a 5% GST-like tax on food and drinks that exceed a certain calorie, sugar or fat content. Making people get weighed for their taxes isn't exactly going to be logistically, morally or politically possible in the foreseeable future.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Subsidizing fresh fruit and veg wouldn't hurt either.
  - thomasfoster96 12y ago
    At the moment in Australia we have 10% GST on things or no GST on things. Changing that to 15% (for most unhealthy items) and -5% is the sort of thing I'd like to see.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
"11. Get a quick, binding divorce online." If you google "divorce online" you get a shitload of links for existing services.
therobot24 12y ago
> 32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It's ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+. Thought this was basically urgent care.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
For #4: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/findster-the-gps-tracker-without-monthly-fees--2 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/findster-the-gps-tracker-...
vseloved 12y ago
Lots of 1st world problems here
recursive 12y ago
> 5. Share my health and fitness data with my doctor and my trainer in real time and get advice. This is exactly what TrainingPeaks does.
ddw 12y ago
Most of these come down to "give me what I want now for less money!" Is this all that technology is good for?
ryandvm 12y ago
> 7. Have my car keep a web record of everywhere it has been, how it is doing, and what needs fixing or updating. There are a lot of worthy problems on this list, but #7 has been completely solved by the current connected car devices like Zubie (http://zubie.co/ http://zubie.co/) or Automatic (https://www.automatic.com/ https://www.automatic.com/).
lazyjones 12y ago
Underwhelming, mostly "luxury problems" other people don't have. He can probably fund a bunch of startups to tackle most instead of complaining. You know what I miss most? While there are plenty of online courses, some even for particular specializations, noone offers "synthesizable" courses targeted at arbitrary special fields with arbitrary preexisting skills. For example, I want to learn everything about state-of-the-art battery production (e.g. how factories operate, what the scaling issues are etc.). I have a background mostly in IT, physics from school, strong in mathematics. I should be able to choose this specialized topic and then "add" prerequisite courses until I'm confident that I can build on my existing knowledge and get exactly what I need to know to become proficient in battery production. My current choices are either to study physics at a major university and try to find courses that cover my target topic to specialize towards the end (realistically, I'd have to read 100+ publications to cover recent advances), or to find books on the topic and whenever I feel I lack knowledge to understand a book, other books to cover these holes. Very difficult, trial-and-error and slow. Or I could hire a personal trainer(?) proficient in the field (how to find?) to get me there. Neither of these seem very attractive and efficient and having a flexible online course system for this purpose would really help. Any takers? Don't you want a simple, effective way to become proficient in a particular field without wading knee-deep through useless material for years?
plus9z 12y ago
"28. Find a teacher of general relativity online. I tried." Really? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&list=PLPPSIjDe9T-81p1CjN49_Zi_L4-NQorTp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&list=PLPPSIjDe9T...
Sgoettschkes 12y ago
15. Call the police or the fire department or paramedics using an app. I think this app is called telephone. You use it by typing an identifier of the service you want to reach (e.g. 911) and a call is dispatched.
theklub 12y ago
Half of these are already available, I'm too lazy to go through and list them. On a side note google "Fred Krueger"

80 points by imd23 12y ago

"Liked" 6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). There's actually a new Swedish startup (I'm not a part of it) that does exactly this! https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE https://twitter.com/LaundryOnlineSE "LaundryOnline is a swedish startup created to make ur day more awesome by taking care of ur laundry. We pick up and deliver ur laundry fast and easy." Seems cool!

diziet 12y ago
Washio does this in SF as well (I've been a happy user) 12. Get a qualified guitar / piano / cello teacher to come to my house without randomly calling people on craigslist or doing general google searches. 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. Both of these are possible with the right apps~
- mkaroumi 12y ago
  Cool, thanks for the info. There's always "an app for that"
- stefan_kendall3 12y ago
  They also operate in DC apparently. It was significantly less expensive to not meet the weight minimum and pay extra vs. use the hotel laundry service.

jokoon 12y ago

first world problems of somebody living in the silicon valley ? sorry but most of those things either stems from politics or lack of market development.

octatone2 12y ago
Or just dumb ideas. Call the police from an app? Your phone is still a phone ...
- ntietz 12y ago
  While it's easy to call emergency services by 911, it's more difficult to call, say, the local sheriff's office for something that's not an emergency especially when you're traveling. An app could help solve that and resolve the best non-emergency number for you in your current location.
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    Establishing a non-emergency number is not hard. Dial 101 in the UK and you're put through to your local police force: http://www.police.uk/contact/101/ http://www.police.uk/contact/101/
    - ntietz 12y ago
      In the US and Canada, apparently you can also call 311 for non-emergency calls (whereas 911 is for emergencies).
  - antr 12y ago
    http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/about-112 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/about-112
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      112 is an emergency number, though.
      - k-mcgrady 12y ago
        In the UK we have 101 for non emergency police and 999 (or 112) for emergency. I think 111 does a non emergency call to the health service where they will listen to your problem and give you advice (ambulance, doctor the next day, your fine etc.).

fphhotchips 12y ago

I remain frustrated that world financial systems are unable to handle instant money transfers between institutions. There seems to me to be no good reason that I shouldn't be able to transfer money between my accounts without waiting until midnight for the funds to clear. Worse, the routine seems not to run on weekends. Why is this? Is power unavailable on Saturday night?

dasil003 12y ago
I'm pretty sure this is to enable an acceptable level of fraud protection. Within some countries (UK) it is more or less instant most of the time.
- tomblomfield 12y ago
  Since 2008 the UK, the Faster Payments Service[1] on infrastructure run by Vocalink[2] enable bank-to-bank payments that usually clear in a couple of seconds. This should work 24/7, depending on the sending and receiving bank. Many banks will "soft post" the payment during the day in a mirror ledger, and then run overnight batch processes to "hard post". Of course, their batches only run on business days. Because there's no-one around at the weekend to crank the handles on the machines...? I'd expect to see Faster Payments rolled out in the US in the next 5-7 years. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VocaLink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VocaLink
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    The latency still isn't good enough with FPS. I still have to wait until COB the next working day to transfer money from my building society to my bank account :(
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    The oral history is that the UK's systems were built by Australians, because we and the kiwis have had this level of convenience since the late 90s.

sgt101 12y ago

1) Make everyone else do what I want, for free. 2) Discount the cost of other peoples investment (capital and social) to zero. 3) Never have things go wrong. 4) Magic.

stefan_kendall3 12y ago
My advice is worth money, but things I want should be free. ...okay bud.

skrebbel 12y ago

All of these score 1 on one of my favorite HN comments, the Yudkowski Ambition Scale[0]. That's OK, but it's a bit disappointing for a post that clearly tries to come off as visionary. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702

caseyohara 12y ago
You're right that none of these ideas are ambitious, but that's exactly the point. The list is "Things I still can't do in November 2014".
- skrebbel 12y ago
  Yeah ok. I must've not had my coffee yet.
netcan 12y ago
These are both kind of like brainstorming tools, ways of thinking about ideas. Your tool encourages one to aggrandise an idea, which can be useful. This encourages trivialisation an idea, which can be useful too. I think doing both at the same time is a sort of essential entrepreneurial doublethink. Ideas, products, inventions and such are surprisingly (very surprisingly, to me) hard to place on that Yudkowski Ambition Scale. The line between trivial and revolutionary is surprisingly blurry. I think one could argue or tweak several of these to be in the 2-5/6 range. At least they could to the extent that they can be argue to be a 1. 1. Get a blood test simply, myself, without going to a lab, and get the results overnight. If you extend this past just bloods, combine this with DIY diagnostics tools, 23andme, items 5, 16, 31... I'm sure you can arrive at a sort of preventative medicine something something new paradigm. A Yudkowski 3? 2. Build a house myself using standard small interchangeable parts like legos. Revolutionize town and cityscapes, quarter the cost of our single biggest purchase.... Yudkowski 3, I think. Even Yudkowski's 1 & 2 could arguably be 3-5s.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
That's hysterical! I like how the transhuman stuff starts at (6), the potential existential risks at (7), and by the time you get to (10) you're literally more ambitious than God. Of course, there needs to be an analogous scale for controlling the outcomes of developing anything that ambitious. And a choir that you can hire to follow you around singing the necessary Ominous Latin Chanting while you announce your ambition levels.

hakankibar 12y ago

6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). We do exactly that :) http://temizlikyolda.com/ http://temizlikyolda.com/

Spidler 12y ago
It's oldstyle in London too. Lockers in the basement, lock your laundry in, send a mail off, and get them delivered in time. Works brilliantly.

beartime 12y ago

boring! 1. jetpack 2. real hoverboard 3. immortality

frtab 12y ago

Some of those already exist, and some of those should never exist.

Omniusaspirer 12y ago

Most of these revolve around non-tech industries having horrendously bad tech/web presence. Laundry, musicians, hospitals, government, banks- all of these are extremely traditional fields with many of them mired in incredible amounts of regulation. Hospitals are particularly embarrassing- even just moving to electronic records is taking them over a decade and ~100 billion dollars to do. Many hospitals are still fighting the transition heavily despite every estimate I can find pointing to massive cost savings several times the initial expense. Unfortunately I suspect we'll all be waiting a long time for even basic conveniences like home blood drawings, let alone cheap MRI's. http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.long http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/5/1103.long

S4M 12y ago

> 6. Get somebody to come to my house, pick up my dry cleaning and drop it back off the next day (Amazon "Clean"). Isn't this what HomeJoy is doing? If not, I have a friend who tried that, but failed. I'd be happy to forward his details. > 9. Send $10,000 to my caretaker in France and have her get the cash and withdraw it from an ATM that same day. Within Europe, you can. > 10. Get investors for my startup by advertising the stock offering on the web and selling shares directly. Isn't that what KickStarter does? > 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online. I think it's better that you can't divorce that way.

swombat 12y ago
> Isn't that what KickStarter does? And a whole bunch of other crowdfunding sites in the UK - Crowdcube, Seedrs, etc. I don't know what the equivalents are in the US, but I'm sure they exist...
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> Isn't that what KickStarter does? No you can't offer a % of your company as a reward on Kickstarter. I think AngelList is probably closest with syndicated deals.
jotm 12y ago
On 9. - you can't just send or withdraw $10,000 - you need to go to the bank, declare the purpose of this transfer, sign some papers and then wait a few days for it to be cleared. The limit varies between countries. Money laundering laws and all that. Some banks actually decline large withdrawals (but not transfers) if you have a weak/suspicious reason ("I want to buy five 3D LED TVs today" :-)).
pmontra 12y ago
Transferring money across countries in Europe (and even across different banks in the same country) is not that fast. Maybe it takes a couple of days. Doing it with PayPal is probably the closest thing to instantaneous transfers. However actually getting those money out of the bank or PayPal as banknotes is more difficult. The times when banks and states where letting go the money in their vaults are long gone. Larger greeds and larger debts mean that there are de facto limits to how much you can cash out per day. I don't even want to think about what I should go through to get 10,000 EUR in cash at my bank.

sup 12y ago

> 21. take a picture of any object and find out where to buy it (Shazam for things) Like Amazon Firefly.

eterm 12y ago
I'm pretty sure that many of these problems could be "solved" by hiring a personal assistant type person to do things like find out where to buy something or coordinate his dry cleaning. But it sounds like this person is incredibly self entitled and wouldn't pay for that.

gordaco 12y ago

Honestly, I find some of these points quite disturbing. And a lot of them are not a matter of technology. 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. I don't want to work with you, ever. 40 hours a week are for the team, sure, but during the remaining 128 you don't have any business in my life. What you propose is creepy. 25. Be able to take a course online and get graded -- and get a diploma that means something. Education is really ripe for disruption: Coursera is OK, but we need to invent Stanford 2.0 For a diploma to mean something, what you need is not to make the courses better, or harder to pass, or whatever you're thinking; what you need is to convince your employer that you have the required skills for your job. The diploma may or may not have something to do with it, but in any case it's your employer's criterion. What you want may happen over time, but it's definitely not a matter of technology. 26. Be able to sell my advice online. It's worth something and I should have some way to monetize it. Again, it's other people, not you, who will judge whether your advice is valuable. Aside from that, it's not like it's difficult to become some kind of consultant. 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers. What. 31. Be able to get a $100 MRI. It can be done for this price. There are a LOT of things that will cost you far, far, far more than what they cost [EDIT: to clarify, that I mean is: far than what they cost to your provider]. This is pretty basic economy, IMHO. Also you may get it for free when you actually need it, if you live in a place with a sane health system (i.e., not the USA). But yeah, as jokoon said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8648325, most of those "problems" arise from politics and economy. I suspect that a few of them have actually been tried, and either they're doing fine but in a local scale, or they failed.

lingoberry 12y ago
Regarding 30. wasn't it recently concluded here on HN that obese people actually end up costing less to society since they tend not to survive into their 80s/90s? Not that his thought is good even if this was not true.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  An obese person costs more per year but less per lifetime since he dies sooner. Correspondingly, an obese person should pay more each year but they will pay less over their lifetime.

ElectricMonk79 12y ago

> 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers Perpetuating the myth that unhealthy people are a financial and social burden. That's wrong because.... * MIND QUAKE: Fat people are 'on average' healthier!! * Why? Because they clutch their heart and die in an instant. 'Healthy people' drag their boney carcasses from care home to care home for decades. Do the world a favour - grab yourself a beer, a burger and some cigarettes. Knock yourself out; literally.

gordaco 12y ago
I don't think I buy it, do you have some references? There are a lot of nonfatal chronic illneses derived from obesity, alcohol consumption and tobacco. My biggests problem with this point are not related with the veracity of his implied statement, but rather, with the slippery slope of making people pay more because of health problems (that are actually less in their control than we may believe), which is anyway happening already in an indirect way; and also, that it would constitute another form of poverty tax, considering that obesity is often caused by the poor quality food that people with little to no money can afford.
- ElectricMonk79 12y ago
  http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/healthcare/fatties-and-smokers-save-the-nhs-money/ http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/healthcare/fatties-and-smokers... > Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000. And as Kip Viscusi has pointed out, when you add in the costs of the state pensions that those who die young don’t get, smoking and gorging save the government vast sums of money.
  - gordaco 12y ago
    Thanks. Quite a surprising finding. That article links to another one from the NY times [1], with this interesting line: The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...

estebank 12y ago

> 30. Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers Am I the only one finding this insulting, disgusting and backwards? People can be overweight for a multitude of reasons, some of which are: * Genetics * Medication * Health conditions * Smoking * Enviromental reasons * Lack of sleep * Age * Pregnancy * An inactive lifestyle coupled with high consumtion of lipids You want the government to spend less money in fat people? Make the government first invest money to avoid having an epidemic of overweight people. Some people have reasons other than stuffing their faces for being fat. It'd be impolite of me to say what I think of this person for implying there aren't.

jwdunne 12y ago
Medication resonates with me strongly. A lot of anti-psychotics increase appetite massively and are known to cause weight gain. I remember I was larger than I'd ever been and I'd got to that point very quickly. A "fat tax" could very well hit some of the most vulnerable citizens. People with severe, long-term psychotic illnesses who are prescribed neuroleptics long-term and are unable to work comes to mind. Perhaps making healthy foods more accessible than unhealthy foods is a better place to start. In the UK, for example, I could buy much more processed food stocked full with sugar than I can fresh vegetables for the same price.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
I can see something like this making a little sense in a country with 100% free health cared paid by taxes. If you have a disease you've caused yourself (by smoking, taking drugs, eating badly) why should everyone else have to help you through their taxes? That's not my opinion though, I don't think that's how it should work but I guess that's how he's looking at it.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Well, smokers already pay more (e.g, 80% of the price of a pack in France is taxes, and many other countries have similar rates). Sugar taxes are also appearing in some countries.

bcardarella 12y ago

#12 is trying to be solved by learnivore.com

crdoconnor 12y ago

"Get a discount from the federal government for being healthy. Fat people should pay more taxes because they cost society more. This means some approved weigh in and testing centers" This argument seems to be pretty common among the glitterati from Wall Street. I wonder why they don't see the incredible irony.

ue_ 12y ago
Not that I agree with the quote but, can you explain the irony?
- jboynyc 12y ago
  Wall Street's irresponsible behavior -- several orders of magnitude more irresponsible than making the wrong dietary choices -- cost the American public quite dearly around 2008, remember?
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Bailouts and ZIRP facilitating and propping up the great American casino which he was a part of cost trillions of dollars. That isn't even counting the many Americans who have been scammed via their mortgages or 401Ks. I'm not sure what fat people cost the taxpayer. Given that they typically pay their own medical expenses, I would guess not a lot. Also, clearly their sad state of affairs is due to the quirky American agricultural and food processing industries. France doesn't have this problem with obesity and neither did the US in 1970. I don't see him crying out for a special tax on Monsanto. Maybe because his portfolio would take a hit. Either way, this facebook post is pretty representative of the inhuman views that American neo-royalty holds.
- myg204 12y ago
  Maybe because wall street was deemed "too big to fail" and propped up with billions upon billions when it collapsed?
anw 12y ago
I agree. This is also a bit of a slippery slope. My 2 previous jobs offered health coverage that included gym membership discounts. This is a proper motivator [for me]. If I want to maintain and improve my health, I'm offered the benefit of doing so with perks. But what advantage does it give to those who have something such as a heart condition that won't allow them to participate in the same exercises? In this case, diet could be the helping factor. Then do these people get a refund on part of their grocery bill? The problem is trying to create cookie cutter solutions to people that are diverse and have complex issues.

Beltiras 12y ago

Much of this list is things you can do with a little ingenuity. ER problem is US specific. Scandinavian countries don't have that problem (to name 1st world countries that have "solved" HC). What does he want to test via blood? There are a lot of specific solutions available. Some would argue he should buy a Tesla and that's that on the car front. And then there's just the stupid stuff like "call FD with an app"..... cuz 911 is soo hard to remember. And the gross misunderstanding of Bitcoin. The value fluctuates. That's any currency, not just Bitcoin. Even the value of the dollar is volatile (inflation). He couldn't find a physicist to teach him GR? That's so amusing it brought me to tears. Did he try .... a local university? The invasion of privacy he calls for is .... disturbing. If he can get MRI's done @ 100$ per pop, he's got a business to run and money to make. Go do it! I could go on tearing that list to shreds.

netcan 12y ago

18. Invest $10,000 in Uber in the secondary market by buying some shares from an existing shareholder -- with just a few clicks. If this one gets solved, it would be weirdly ironic. That's supposedly what public markets are for. This BTW, is one an entrepreneurial government could tackle.

sarhus 12y ago

> 22. have all my accounting being done as a SASS. In UK that's done by Crunch (http://www.crunch.co.uk/ http://www.crunch.co.uk/)

rdc12 12y ago

Most of these seem possible and some of them are really creepy take this for example [1], first off that would be unmanagable list, allready exists (dating services, tinder, etc) and is presented in a very dodgy way. [1] "27. Be able to see a list of all single people in LA right now and efficiently sort through this data, with two way opt-in, to find an ideal match"

peterkelly 12y ago

> 11. Get a quick, binding divorce online. Umm... really???

vermooten 12y ago

"32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It's ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+." You can. It's called 'living in Europe.'

waterlesscloud 12y ago
You even quoted the part where he says "the system". He's talking about total costs, including to the government. Rightly or wrongly, he believes there's room to dramatically lower actual health care costs.

nikcub 12y ago

> 26. Be able to sell my advice online. It's worth something and I should have some way to monetize it. It is called Google Helpouts[0], and it isn't going very well. Reason why - almost everybody overvalues what their advice is actually worth. People who can provide value usually already are through their usual economic activity - be it a job or entrepreneurialism (ie. If your advice was worth something, you'd already be monetizing it). Websites that create Shingy[1] As A Service type markets around paid advice often just become cesspools of psychics and webcam sex operators. [0] https://helpouts.google.com/home https://helpouts.google.com/home [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3

netcan 12y ago
There have been a bunch of attempts. I think that one might eventually succeed. The problem is the difficulty in actually figuring out who's advice is worth what & where. But, in many cases 30 minutes with the right person could be incredibly valuable. Technical/scientific/engineering expertise is one are, industry knowledge is another one. I think the second might be the most important. Say you have some sort of awesome technology that you want to market to the hotel industry. You need to understand how that industry works. What software they use & how. What they pay for various things. The right person could get you months ahead in 30 minutes.
- madeofpalk 12y ago
  The problem is the same as why Freelancer, ODesk and the rest suck so much: majority of the good designers already have full-time jobs. People who have valuable advice worth paying for are usually already being paid by their employer.
- cgio 12y ago
  Have you seen 10eqs? http://www.10eqs.com/ http://www.10eqs.com/
Kiro 12y ago
There's a difference between personal tutoring and general advice. I believe he meant the latter. Like for example paying to see this kind of list.

jsnell 12y ago

> 4. Locate where my dog is right now using a barely noticeable GPS chip. > 13. Keep track of where everybody in my team is physically right now. I think we can kill two birds with one stone here. Your team is collared, right?

glenra 12y ago
#13 seems easy and there exist apps for it. Not that the team would WANT to do this, but if you had a sufficiently compelling use case the problem doesn't seem difficult. For instance, if everyone on his team carries a smartphone (iOS or Android) they can all install google+ and turn on background location sharing so he can see them on a map. https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3302509?hl=en https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3302509?hl=en There's also Apple's "Find My Friends" cloud feature, and a bunch of 3rd-party apps that do the same. If they don't carry a cellphone then...um...give them one and tell them to carry it. :-)

pmontra 12y ago

Most of the points are about scarce resources that must be retrieved using a specialized network of experts. If a company has to build a solution, there must be a market large enough to make it profitable in the long run. If no, we need some crowdsourced enterprise similar to what OpenStreetMap did for maps or Wikipedia did for general knowledge. Some random thoughts on some points that stand out more for me. There are tools for 4, but non barely noticeable. There are problems with batteries too. 13 is disturbing. I won't work with him and he probably won't be willing to hire me. 14 would be great but I'm afraid paper and pencil are still the best tools if we want to trust the results of an election and keep ballots anonymous, notwithstanding a lot or research on the subject. I won't trust any solution with an IP header that can be traced to me or with a database that could receive fake votes. At least in physical elections parties can send their representatives to polling stations and check if anything strange is going on. 29. Indoor Maps from Google is tackling that problem. Probably they are not the only ones working on that. Getting 31 for free is pretty common in Europe and probably in other areas of the world. That's not a matter of being in 2014 but of where one lives.

krc5kz 12y ago

I could see Theranos trying to solve #1

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

shruubi 12y ago

The fact that this guy seems to want to be able to track his teams physical location, sell his advice for a large sum of money and be able to get quick divorces tells me this isn't the kind of person I want in any kind of real power...

thomasfoster96 12y ago

I'm sure 30 is probably best achieved by putting a 5% GST-like tax on food and drinks that exceed a certain calorie, sugar or fat content. Making people get weighed for their taxes isn't exactly going to be logistically, morally or politically possible in the foreseeable future.

crdoconnor 12y ago
Subsidizing fresh fruit and veg wouldn't hurt either.
- thomasfoster96 12y ago
  At the moment in Australia we have 10% GST on things or no GST on things. Changing that to 15% (for most unhealthy items) and -5% is the sort of thing I'd like to see.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

"11. Get a quick, binding divorce online." If you google "divorce online" you get a shitload of links for existing services.

therobot24 12y ago

> 32. Be able to get into an ER for under $100. It's ridicoulous that a mere 15 min consultation can cost somebody (the system) $1000+. Thought this was basically urgent care.

bryanlarsen 12y ago

For #4: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/findster-the-gps-tracker-without-monthly-fees--2 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/findster-the-gps-tracker-...

vseloved 12y ago

Lots of 1st world problems here

recursive 12y ago

> 5. Share my health and fitness data with my doctor and my trainer in real time and get advice. This is exactly what TrainingPeaks does.

ddw 12y ago

Most of these come down to "give me what I want now for less money!" Is this all that technology is good for?

ryandvm 12y ago

> 7. Have my car keep a web record of everywhere it has been, how it is doing, and what needs fixing or updating. There are a lot of worthy problems on this list, but #7 has been completely solved by the current connected car devices like Zubie (http://zubie.co/ http://zubie.co/) or Automatic (https://www.automatic.com/ https://www.automatic.com/).

lazyjones 12y ago

Underwhelming, mostly "luxury problems" other people don't have. He can probably fund a bunch of startups to tackle most instead of complaining. You know what I miss most? While there are plenty of online courses, some even for particular specializations, noone offers "synthesizable" courses targeted at arbitrary special fields with arbitrary preexisting skills. For example, I want to learn everything about state-of-the-art battery production (e.g. how factories operate, what the scaling issues are etc.). I have a background mostly in IT, physics from school, strong in mathematics. I should be able to choose this specialized topic and then "add" prerequisite courses until I'm confident that I can build on my existing knowledge and get exactly what I need to know to become proficient in battery production. My current choices are either to study physics at a major university and try to find courses that cover my target topic to specialize towards the end (realistically, I'd have to read 100+ publications to cover recent advances), or to find books on the topic and whenever I feel I lack knowledge to understand a book, other books to cover these holes. Very difficult, trial-and-error and slow. Or I could hire a personal trainer(?) proficient in the field (how to find?) to get me there. Neither of these seem very attractive and efficient and having a flexible online course system for this purpose would really help. Any takers? Don't you want a simple, effective way to become proficient in a particular field without wading knee-deep through useless material for years?

plus9z 12y ago

"28. Find a teacher of general relativity online. I tried." Really? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&list=PLPPSIjDe9T-81p1CjN49_Zi_L4-NQorTp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0&list=PLPPSIjDe9T...

Sgoettschkes 12y ago

15. Call the police or the fire department or paramedics using an app. I think this app is called telephone. You use it by typing an identifier of the service you want to reach (e.g. 911) and a call is dispatched.

theklub 12y ago

Half of these are already available, I'm too lazy to go through and list them. On a side note google "Fred Krueger"