5 ms·

Show HN: RealProblemHunt – Find problems to solve

hackerews 12y ago
This is great. It'd be very powerful if it existed for major industries or functions within a business (eg business intelligence, it, etc). People would pay to listen in. Almost like https://www.doximity.com/ https://www.doximity.com/ for other businesses.
- sogen 12y ago
  Explain please
  - hackerews 12y ago
    Imagine a community of business intelligence analysts, or a different community of data scientists, maybe another one of accountants, or a separate one of structural engineers. Each online community is invite-only, and you can talk about your trade, new/interesting solutions, and the problems you have with your software and tools. I think conferences and associates often fill this void for many industries, but it'd be cool to have a "realProblems" site that's focused.
    - mfisher87 12y ago
      I think this is a more viable (and beneficial to society) product than the generic RealProblemHunt site that is presented to us. The generic site is, in my opinion, vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. A more focused tool like this could help professional communities prioritize problems within their field in a public way. For example, a similar product for game developers might prioritize fixing game monetization. A "global" board like the one presented here would likely never prioritize such an idea.
      - hackerews 12y ago
        Agreed. And these communities will likely bubble up from someone in it, or very close to it - not just someone building a generic platform.
      - johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
        Great idea. Based on the feedback and suggestions we gathered, we're now planing to split the site into different categories or at least focus in a specific community of people first.
mgkimsal 12y ago
"It's hard to find problems on RealProblemHunt that are problems outside of PH"
blakerson 12y ago
"Join our newsletter to receive problems to your inbox" does not sound very fun. You might rephrase that to emphasize some positive outcome. edit: I'm taking my own advice and would like to congratulate you on launching and trying to drive some social good via startups. Good luck!
- johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We will change it :)
kcole16 12y ago
Cool idea. I especially agree with this problem: "It's hard for multiple developers to share one staging server". My company has two staging servers, but with a team of 6 devs, someone often has to wait. Does anybody know of any solutions to spin up/down staging servers in a cost-effective way?.
- ac2u 12y ago
  If your application is *nix based, then running a system with Docker at it's core could be an option. Some folks have a staging domain for their application, then use the SHA/tag of a release in a subdomain, and route based on subdomain to a running container.
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  Partition them into VMs? Alternately, I use vagrant-aws (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws) to quickly do this on Amazon. Just be very careful to not check your keys into source control.
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    Yeah, VMs were my thought too -- VMs are easy to spin up and cheap/free, so why bother having everyone share one staging server? Use a configuration management tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc. to make sure everyone's staging VMs are configured the same, and you're good to go.
- tjmehta 12y ago
  Hey Kcole, we are actually currently building product to solve this problem at Runnable, http://runnable.io http://runnable.io. Email us at support@runnable.com and we will be happy to give you an invite. We would love to hear what you think
biomimic 12y ago
You guys should do a Real Solution Hunt. I'll provide the tech to fuzzy match the Real Problems with Real Solutions.
aerialcombat 12y ago
Wow what a great idea!
davidrusu 12y ago
Wow sucks to be in the Philippians right now :D I fear that having very localized problems will end up killing the site. Most people can't act on these problems but they are taking up valuable space on the front page.
itschaffey 12y ago
This is awesome - I'm a big fan. I'm running an early stage startup and having somewhere to ping problems to a community would be extremely beneficial. Really interested to see how it grows over the coming months.
pskittle 12y ago
Good intention. I would work on your copy. Perhaps "request for solutions".
Kiro 12y ago
So I've seen this idea in different incarnations. My favourite was probably the one that scraped Twitter for people complaining about various things and had people rank those. This seem like a decent attempt to actually make it viable though. Good luck!
- tomweingarten 12y ago
  Do you have a link for that? Sounds cool
- pknerd 12y ago
  I guess someone made such thing and posted on HN a few years back. I don't know URL
stevesearer 12y ago
I'd say it is probably more like a Stack Exchange for problems than a Product Hunt for problems. Browsing Product Hunt is too distracting for me because there are so many solutions to problems I'm not having, which inevitably get me off track of what I am trying to do.
txu 12y ago
Also came up this idea two nights ago before falling asleep, and two days later someone did it! Looking forward to see how it evolves.
dataker 12y ago
Great initiative, but I wouldn't just "copy" the model of PH/HN/Reddit in the long run. Lots of cool new things could be done.
Dirlewanger 12y ago
This site is just...wow. A parody containing other parodies. And there most likely be actual serious start-ups be started off of some of these.
metasean 12y ago
This looks like it needs some type of integration into existing "let's build this" and "let's fix this" types of sites: - https://assembly.com/discover - https://www.bountysource.com/
RankingMember 12y ago
I really like the idea, but the cheeky part of me now suddenly really wants to make a parody site called "RealREALProblemHunt" where the top problems are things like "I have no access to clean water" and "First world countries keep exporting their garbage to my country's shores" as a counterpoint to the ones on this site like "Need to live to be 300 years old" and "Cannot find a place to order late night food past midnight.".
eastbayjake 12y ago
I went to the site expecting to find "real" problems in the vein of "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework" or "I have to care for a sick relative but it's hard to get medical advice for small ailments", etc. Most of these just seem like problems in search of a narrowly-focused consumer internet product for upper-middle-class white people or other engineers. That might be a feature and not a bug.
- glup 12y ago
  My friends and I have a term, narp, for "Not a real problem" for exactly these cases. It can also be used a verb, you can say someone is narping when they are devoting time to solving non-real problems. Sure these are problems, but they are limited to a very specific demographic in many cases. Let's not pretend that working on these is more meaningful than it actually is.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  You really expected "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework"? Like any start-up, real people join at a later stage once the company has millions of users.
ArekDymalski 12y ago
As far as I remember the oldest attempt to create something like that was http://theinternetwishlist.com/ http://theinternetwishlist.com/ These sites always seem to suffer from the same problem - not enough contributing members. It's quite understandable - what is the incentive to post a problem? What is a chance that someone will solve it? When will it happen? How will I know about it? etc. All these factors result in a situation in which people rather treat such sites as an entertaining curiosity. My suggestion to improve it is: make it an inverted Kickstarter - if I've got a problem I pledge X dollars for someone to create a solution for it. Other people with similar problem add their pledges. When the sum starts to look tasty developers pick up the challenge and compete (?) for the bounty. The backers get the solution at discounted prices. Everyone's happy and live long ever after ;)
- fiatjaf 12y ago
  I've been thinking about the reverse kickstarter for years. It is an awesome idea, but it would also suffer from a lot of problems: - Just like any "network": not enough contributing members. - People would pay now or when the problem was solved? Are they going to guarantee payment for something without a certain date? - Who would decide if the problem was solved or not?
- johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
  Thank you so much for those valuable feedback and suggestion! It will really help us think of ideas on how to improve the site. Cheers!
- amit_m 12y ago
  ReverseFunder: http://blog.oxify.co/2014/10/09/our-mission-make-ideas-come-true/ http://blog.oxify.co/2014/10/09/our-mission-make-ideas-come-...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
npguy 12y ago
There is a similar one for ideas at http://firespotting.com http://firespotting.com
Erwin 12y ago
I like http://www.halfbakery.com/ http://www.halfbakery.com/ -- ideas there aren't quite serious.
Tideflat 12y ago
I want an RSS feed, but I don't see an RSS feed.
bbcbasic 12y ago
Problem: How to I find solutions to my problem? Answer: Yahoo Answers, AskVille, AnswerBag, Stack Exchange, Quora, Hacker News Ask, Google ...
johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
@all - Hi guys! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions. It will really help us improve the site. We're still at a very early stage so we really have lots of things to fix and improve. Be sure to visit the FAQ page to get an idea on what are the use cases of the site - http://realproblemhunt.com/faq http://realproblemhunt.com/faq To improve the site we are planning to split the site into different categories or at least first focus in a specific community of people so the problems listed will be more relevant to the type of visitor. What are your thoughts about this?
- Toast_ 12y ago
  did you make this using microscope?
  - johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
    Nope. It's built on Django
    - Toast_ 12y ago
      Drum? It seems like I recognize the general format. Anyways, props, and best of luck.
johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
@all - Hi again. We're planning to add categories and tags. Any suggestion on what categories and tags should we add? And do you think splitting the site into subdomains makes more sense or using categories and tags is enough? Thanks in advance.

This is great. It'd be very powerful if it existed for major industries or functions within a business (eg business intelligence, it, etc). People would pay to listen in. Almost like https://www.doximity.com/ https://www.doximity.com/ for other businesses.

sogen 12y ago
Explain please
- hackerews 12y ago
  Imagine a community of business intelligence analysts, or a different community of data scientists, maybe another one of accountants, or a separate one of structural engineers. Each online community is invite-only, and you can talk about your trade, new/interesting solutions, and the problems you have with your software and tools. I think conferences and associates often fill this void for many industries, but it'd be cool to have a "realProblems" site that's focused.
  - mfisher87 12y ago
    I think this is a more viable (and beneficial to society) product than the generic RealProblemHunt site that is presented to us. The generic site is, in my opinion, vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. A more focused tool like this could help professional communities prioritize problems within their field in a public way. For example, a similar product for game developers might prioritize fixing game monetization. A "global" board like the one presented here would likely never prioritize such an idea.
    - hackerews 12y ago
      Agreed. And these communities will likely bubble up from someone in it, or very close to it - not just someone building a generic platform.
    - johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
      Great idea. Based on the feedback and suggestions we gathered, we're now planing to split the site into different categories or at least focus in a specific community of people first.

mgkimsal 12y ago

"It's hard to find problems on RealProblemHunt that are problems outside of PH"

blakerson 12y ago

"Join our newsletter to receive problems to your inbox" does not sound very fun. You might rephrase that to emphasize some positive outcome. edit: I'm taking my own advice and would like to congratulate you on launching and trying to drive some social good via startups. Good luck!

johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We will change it :)

kcole16 12y ago

Cool idea. I especially agree with this problem: "It's hard for multiple developers to share one staging server". My company has two staging servers, but with a team of 6 devs, someone often has to wait. Does anybody know of any solutions to spin up/down staging servers in a cost-effective way?.

ac2u 12y ago
If your application is *nix based, then running a system with Docker at it's core could be an option. Some folks have a staging domain for their application, then use the SHA/tag of a release in a subdomain, and route based on subdomain to a running container.
juliangregorian 12y ago
Partition them into VMs? Alternately, I use vagrant-aws (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws) to quickly do this on Amazon. Just be very careful to not check your keys into source control.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Yeah, VMs were my thought too -- VMs are easy to spin up and cheap/free, so why bother having everyone share one staging server? Use a configuration management tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc. to make sure everyone's staging VMs are configured the same, and you're good to go.
tjmehta 12y ago
Hey Kcole, we are actually currently building product to solve this problem at Runnable, http://runnable.io http://runnable.io. Email us at support@runnable.com and we will be happy to give you an invite. We would love to hear what you think

biomimic 12y ago

You guys should do a Real Solution Hunt. I'll provide the tech to fuzzy match the Real Problems with Real Solutions.

aerialcombat 12y ago

Wow what a great idea!

davidrusu 12y ago

Wow sucks to be in the Philippians right now :D I fear that having very localized problems will end up killing the site. Most people can't act on these problems but they are taking up valuable space on the front page.

itschaffey 12y ago

This is awesome - I'm a big fan. I'm running an early stage startup and having somewhere to ping problems to a community would be extremely beneficial. Really interested to see how it grows over the coming months.

pskittle 12y ago

Good intention. I would work on your copy. Perhaps "request for solutions".

Kiro 12y ago

So I've seen this idea in different incarnations. My favourite was probably the one that scraped Twitter for people complaining about various things and had people rank those. This seem like a decent attempt to actually make it viable though. Good luck!

tomweingarten 12y ago
Do you have a link for that? Sounds cool
pknerd 12y ago
I guess someone made such thing and posted on HN a few years back. I don't know URL

stevesearer 12y ago

I'd say it is probably more like a Stack Exchange for problems than a Product Hunt for problems. Browsing Product Hunt is too distracting for me because there are so many solutions to problems I'm not having, which inevitably get me off track of what I am trying to do.

txu 12y ago

Also came up this idea two nights ago before falling asleep, and two days later someone did it! Looking forward to see how it evolves.

dataker 12y ago

Great initiative, but I wouldn't just "copy" the model of PH/HN/Reddit in the long run. Lots of cool new things could be done.

Dirlewanger 12y ago

This site is just...wow. A parody containing other parodies. And there most likely be actual serious start-ups be started off of some of these.

metasean 12y ago

This looks like it needs some type of integration into existing "let's build this" and "let's fix this" types of sites: - https://assembly.com/discover - https://www.bountysource.com/

RankingMember 12y ago

I really like the idea, but the cheeky part of me now suddenly really wants to make a parody site called "RealREALProblemHunt" where the top problems are things like "I have no access to clean water" and "First world countries keep exporting their garbage to my country's shores" as a counterpoint to the ones on this site like "Need to live to be 300 years old" and "Cannot find a place to order late night food past midnight.".

eastbayjake 12y ago

I went to the site expecting to find "real" problems in the vein of "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework" or "I have to care for a sick relative but it's hard to get medical advice for small ailments", etc. Most of these just seem like problems in search of a narrowly-focused consumer internet product for upper-middle-class white people or other engineers. That might be a feature and not a bug.

glup 12y ago
My friends and I have a term, narp, for "Not a real problem" for exactly these cases. It can also be used a verb, you can say someone is narping when they are devoting time to solving non-real problems. Sure these are problems, but they are limited to a very specific demographic in many cases. Let's not pretend that working on these is more meaningful than it actually is.
bbcbasic 12y ago
You really expected "I'm a single working mom and it's hard to help my son with his homework"? Like any start-up, real people join at a later stage once the company has millions of users.

ArekDymalski 12y ago

As far as I remember the oldest attempt to create something like that was http://theinternetwishlist.com/ http://theinternetwishlist.com/ These sites always seem to suffer from the same problem - not enough contributing members. It's quite understandable - what is the incentive to post a problem? What is a chance that someone will solve it? When will it happen? How will I know about it? etc. All these factors result in a situation in which people rather treat such sites as an entertaining curiosity. My suggestion to improve it is: make it an inverted Kickstarter - if I've got a problem I pledge X dollars for someone to create a solution for it. Other people with similar problem add their pledges. When the sum starts to look tasty developers pick up the challenge and compete (?) for the bounty. The backers get the solution at discounted prices. Everyone's happy and live long ever after ;)

fiatjaf 12y ago
I've been thinking about the reverse kickstarter for years. It is an awesome idea, but it would also suffer from a lot of problems: - Just like any "network": not enough contributing members. - People would pay now or when the problem was solved? Are they going to guarantee payment for something without a certain date? - Who would decide if the problem was solved or not?
johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
Thank you so much for those valuable feedback and suggestion! It will really help us think of ideas on how to improve the site. Cheers!
amit_m 12y ago
ReverseFunder: http://blog.oxify.co/2014/10/09/our-mission-make-ideas-come-true/ http://blog.oxify.co/2014/10/09/our-mission-make-ideas-come-...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

npguy 12y ago

There is a similar one for ideas at http://firespotting.com http://firespotting.com

Erwin 12y ago

I like http://www.halfbakery.com/ http://www.halfbakery.com/ -- ideas there aren't quite serious.

Tideflat 12y ago

I want an RSS feed, but I don't see an RSS feed.

bbcbasic 12y ago

Problem: How to I find solutions to my problem? Answer: Yahoo Answers, AskVille, AnswerBag, Stack Exchange, Quora, Hacker News Ask, Google ...

johnkevinmbasco 12y ago

@all - Hi guys! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions. It will really help us improve the site. We're still at a very early stage so we really have lots of things to fix and improve. Be sure to visit the FAQ page to get an idea on what are the use cases of the site - http://realproblemhunt.com/faq http://realproblemhunt.com/faq To improve the site we are planning to split the site into different categories or at least first focus in a specific community of people so the problems listed will be more relevant to the type of visitor. What are your thoughts about this?

Toast_ 12y ago
did you make this using microscope?
- johnkevinmbasco 12y ago
  Nope. It's built on Django
  - Toast_ 12y ago
    Drum? It seems like I recognize the general format. Anyways, props, and best of luck.

johnkevinmbasco 12y ago

@all - Hi again. We're planning to add categories and tags. Any suggestion on what categories and tags should we add? And do you think splitting the site into subdomains makes more sense or using categories and tags is enough? Thanks in advance.