Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist

13 pointsdanielhughes37 comments

A money manager. It knows all the expenses and allocates an allowance. it tells you to get a new job and to trim expenses in a sensible way. it tells you to stop buying so many clothes/books/whatever. it asks you to repeat what you are doing when you don't spend money. it makes you justify expenses before you can have money. it saves for you.

I think this is possible now, when it was impossible before. it funds a debit card monthly for you, and calculates everything else. it learns you finances and then plans accordingly. most people will adapt to whatever money they have, they just suck at managing it. there isn't anyone that tells you "you can't afford that." or "you will run out of money if your lunches are so expensive" "your rent is too much money, get a better job" "you are not saving enough, what can you change so I can save you more money?" that would make life SO much easier.

I like the idea but doubt that would work out, at least not in my environment. I think this can only work if you use your credit card everywhere and always, else you would have to write down your expenses yourself and we know nobody would do that.

Then a lot of payments show up as rather generic. You would need to map a lot of "Payment Messages" to a topic, again something i think i would not do.

I think i could see that working rather in a Bitcoin only environment than anywhere else.

But then again, there apparently are americans who use their credit cards all the time and for everything. This might be just a american thing i cant understand.

There are Europeans who use credit or debit cards for everything, too. There are also several budget managers based on that being the case.

Tink is a Swedish one that I've used and it works well. It uses some Bayesian classifier or whatever to map payment codes to specific vendors, and to assign categories to vendors. When you login, it might say "we're uncertain about these 7 transactions, please classify them." In exchange for this very small amount of work, you get pie charts and trends and whatnot to visualize your spending habits.

When I first tried it years ago I immediately started baking my own bread and making my own hummus every day to cut down on lunch spending.

There are many consumer vendors in Sweden that don't even accept cash. Most bank offices don't handle any cash whatsoever.

A todo list that helps me figure out WTF to do, maybe by generating checklists from a corpus of facts, sources trusted via web of trust, social collaboration, etc.

I'd input "trip to Thailand" and the service would break that down into:

1 check your vaccines

1.1 hepatitis A most important

1.2 try local clinic X, click here to dial

2 check your insurance

2.1 click here if you have home insurance

2.2 click here to purchase trip-specific travel insurance

3 decide dates

3.1 week? two weeks? month? click to specify

3.2 pick a flight, click to browse curated list

And so on. (These should probably be in reverse order but I'm too lazy to change the numbers.)

I'm there too. A crowd sourced and trained machine learning travel agent would be phenomenal. Quite expensive too.

Real life Undo

A smart meta-OS, a computer butler a la Jarvis. I want a ultra-light weight daemon that sits on my network and learns what I use, when and where. Then, after getting a fair amount of data it starts to subtly suggest my next step.

Say, I use Itunes every morning at 6 am for my morning run, except on Sundays or holidays. My Jarvis would see that I'm up and going outside and it's a Tuesday and get my regular playlist ready as a little icon on an unobtrusive toolbar. Or whatever it finds and figures out. Sure it would be a little clunky at first, but people tend to be regular and predictable. Also, people tend to externalize their bodily functions, fire is an external step of digestion and clothing is an external form of fur.

A machine that detects the toxins/harmful chemicals in food materials....

A way to sort or filter Web searches (sites, articles, posts, comments) by the IQ and or age of the person who wrote it. This would help people to minimise low-quality content. Even if the person were unknown, heuristic methods could be devised to estimate the level of intellect in a given article or post. There are various obstacles and abuses to be resolved, but it would still be nice to have a feature like this available. At the same time, I imagine that society would not currently accept such a proposition.

I would take a system that told me the reading level of the article before I click through.

It's surprising the big search engines don't already do something this simple. Maybe a browser plugin could perform this analysis on blocks of text and append a small div at the upper right/left showing the score for each block. Perhaps it could even use things like misspellings and grammar errors as indicators of poor quality control.

A personal life assistant at a good price.

Is it realistic to get something like a 20hrs/mth retainer for like $10/hr to sort out things for me. Something that was a longer term relationship so they get to know your personality plus build trust ideally.

Possibly share this assistant with friends/family.

The role would be to create a 1) one stop shop that 2) gets to know you and 3) can remove small distraction tasks; like coordinate dinner with friends, monitor my emails to pay bills, find good tyres for my car, come up with gift ideas, find me a new cleaner etc.

> for like $10/hr

Hey, big spender !

Telomere lengthener thingy.

I've been waiting for this too. It would be better if somehow only the best performers received this update. The problem is determining which performers are doing their jobs correctly.

A functional news media.

Can you expand on your definition of functional?

One that tells you the truth, not just "things that are true"?

For example, don't just tell us he said, and she said, and leave us to try to figure it out. Investigate until you know who's right, and why, and tell us.

I would rather prefer the exact opposite. News that tell me the facts and then let me figure out my opinion without mentioning theirs all the time.

I really wouldn't -- there are orders of magnitude more facts in the world than I have time to digest, so it certainly helps having a basis of analysis, even if sometimes that analysis is misguided.

I have a habit of jumping into a new hobby/collection every 6-12 months but never know where to start since most online resources cater towards those who already know what they're doing (specifically watches in my case). I started a website hoping to address that, but it's far from finished. If there are any sites that do this already I'd love to see them!

I got a few:

- Teleportation

- Time Machine

- Dream Recorder (as in record our dreams as we see them)

- Mind Reader (as in Mel Gibson in What Women Want :))

> Mind Reader

This is a really, really bad idea.

Holy shit! You just read my mind!

Is there a way to contact you?

sure but what do you want to discuss ?

Teleportation.

Coupled with a time machine.

Coupled with something that is common now, but won't be in a decade.

Oh, and I want a pony, too.

Knowledge uploading like in the Matrix movie

A way to get around Twitter's 800 tweet home timeline limit. Or maybe this exists already? That would be great.

switch-for-me. I don't care who my household energy supplier is, I just want to pay the least each month without the hassle of monitoring my usage, comparing prices and administrating the transfer. You do it for me and you can keep a percentage of the saving.

an easy way to update your address when you move without having to make 500 phone calls

Move to Finland.

They have a population database which is queried by companies, such that if you move house your details are updated once, and instantly visible to companies.

It's both a little disturbing, and highly useful.

Time control Machine

Sorry, I don't think you'll find any free lunch here.

The products I would like to see don't exist because they're not economically viable (e.g. high-quality development and mobile phone hardware using open source firmware) or they depend on technology that doesn't yet exist or doesn't scale well, etc.

You may come up with a novel idea for a viable product, but no one can do this for you.

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