Ask HN: What would make your life better?
I've got a little time after work that I'd like to pool into helping folks on HN (as it's done for me on multiple occasions on throwaway accounts). What would you folks would love to have in your life?
I find most guides are aimed at beginners following an example, and aren't always the best resource to get through an issue when I'm stuck on one detail.
The alternatives are browsing the actual documentation, which can be hard to navigate when you are still learning.
The last option is to ask questions on coding forums, which is where I have had the most success. The main problem is the asyncronous nature of clarifications or follow up questions.
I'd love an app or site where I can post a question to a forum, with a link to a realtime chat session I can monitor for the next few hours and interact with people interested in the topic / question.
I've had a few great experiences on irc channels where a string of questions would turn into a tech talk by someone who understood things in detail. Or someone bored found my problem interesting enough to walk me through step by step until things clicked.
Maybe your site/app could give users a URL to paste into their posts, similar to people linking pastebin examples. It should handle the creation / removal of rooms and possibly archiving in case people want to save a transcript for reference.
If it focused on doing one thing well, I'd use it. I probably wouldn't switch to a new 'general' forum just for the feature though, unless it had a large community to go with it. (stackoverflow network for example)
Whatever you do, good luck and thanks for taking the time to give back.
They seem to be the worst kind of parasitic middlemen, and it seems to be in the interests of both landlord and tenant to get rid of them. But they remain stubbornly popular.
Failing that, our useless government could at least ban them from imposing exploitative "reference checking" fees.
* The ability to sharpen things to "scary sharp." Mostly hand tools like chisels and planes.
* A stack of hardwood.
* A riding lawnmower. You try mowing ~2 hilly acres with a push mower (not even self-propelled!)
* Time to complete some programming courses or books. I'm becoming numb to programming; my work isn't very interesting, and so none of the programming I do is particularly exciting. The courses would give me some ideas to apply to my work, at least.
There's nothing quite like slaving away all day, completing on-call shifts and doing work on the weekends now and then, and being able to save barely any money towards buying a house instead of renting (as renting is a mug's game in the south of the UK).
Patrick McKenzie's advice is good, see:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
And I've also read some really good advice here on HN.
My own personal experience: Based on what I believed to be an unmet need/new opportunity, I built a pretty small project. With help from the university I graduated from, I got contacts with the local business community, and now I have more leads (not yet customers) than I have time (I'm currently full-time employed).
Businessmen were really kind and gave me 15 minutes to listen to their needs and pitch my product. We over-estimate the difficulty of securing a meeting (that's not the same as securing a sale though).
We haven't had a decent winter for a few years now.
;-)