Ask HN: What Is Your Problem?
What is the problem in your industry/job/life that you would like someone to solve? hopefully this thread will lead to some startup ideas and some problems being solved.
I can tell you if you're looking to make this a startup idea, its a shitty one. Bad Market, Hard problem.
With that said, I'd pay >$100 a year for it.
It might be harder in the US because of how much more competitive the grocery market is.
Recipes are just recipes on recipe web sites. NYT Cooking is a nice one. Food prep is just...making the recipes and putting the food in your fridge.
As far as easy meals literally hundreds of services exist for this. I recommend finding one that's local so that you aren't dealing with wasteful packaging and shipping. IMO the ones that fully prepare the meal are honestly better than ones that make you cook it.
Also restaurants exist and a lot of people literally just eat at restaurants/fast casual/fast food for every meal.
As a wise software developer once said... "Good, Cheap, Fast... you may only have two"
We collectively spend a lot of time and money on food, but the good news is that it's one of the joys of life.
Interesting little link: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
No one has the authority to make lasting improvements, and no one has an incentive to take the initiative anyway. There is resistance to change because everyone is either too busy or too lazy to help.
My job is to help immigrants navigate this mess. My strategy to help them is three-tiered: information, tools, policy. So far, policy feels completely out of reach, despite my best effort.
How many queues does X have? How many are write-only queues? How many can be reconfigured to become wider queues? What are the protocols supported by Y? Which version of the protocols are supported?
I would like a tool, - accessible at my fingertips (through a keystroke), regardless of which Window on my Windows (or Linux) desktop has focus - Allows me to search/add/delete for "Facts" which are associated with "Values" - Will show me results in real-time (as I type, auto-suggest etc) - Easily dismissed by ESC once I've looked it up - Able to add/delete on the fly (through a keystroke); will take input as text and as CTRL+V from clipboard. Text, images, paths, etc supported - Scales to 500K+ items - Is able to bring up suggestions fast (<=100ms) - Able to export to common (CSV, XLS, etc) formats
Bonus points for: - Being able to extract this information automatically from PDFs, JPGs etc
If something like this exists, let me know!
Maybe it does and if so I don't want to discount that, but a lot of me doubts it. I think you want to have an answer to these questions instantly available, but have you stopped to consider whether the people asking the questions expect that? And, if they do expect that, are they being reasonable?
A well-presented "I'll look this up and get back to you" type of answer is often acceptable. To me, the idea of this level of intensity is unsustainable.
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're in engineering. If so, I recommend you find some reading on what Sales Engineers do in situations where they're asked curveball questions.
My default thought is that anyone expecting you to know everything instantly is probably being unreasonable.
Otherwise, your database of 'facts' and 'values' will inevitably become out of date if you try to maintain it out of band.
So: this: Each of us may acquire a single-purpose, secure personal-storage device we can easily backup (but with a different key). A query from some org will ask for a list of particulars. If a particular is already on the device, it may be routinely added to the output queue, else it asks us if we wish it to be queued. We can choose to add a missing particular, or edit an existing one. Click, click, gone, done. A particular which requires an official confirmation (e.g. birth certificate) will include a DOI. Org must swap-certify with issueing agency. (It's not my account number.)
Etc. etc. If it does not recognize our voice input on insertion (or detects a rubber hose), it warns the carrier, signals Skynet, then bursts into flames.
Storing the info isn't enough, and forcing every business to adopt the same specification is unrealistic. I think only my high tech dentist has anything digital.
I want to be able to go to a website, check a box beside each item I want, choose a delivery time, and have someone in a white van come and set up everything in my rental apartment or villa, then collect the day before my flight home.
I'd easily pay 50% of the cost of the items for this just for the convenience, and I know I'm not the only one. The target market is NOT nomad or budget travellers - it's professionals on high incomes.
I mentioned this in the 'other idea' section of a recent YC application, but they didn't bite.
1. I mostly travel to lower income countries in South-East Asia. 2. My income is fairly high even for US standards 3. I usually travel for 3-6 months at the minimum. 4. I will just buy the nice monitor, keyboard, etc 5. I just go to the nearby university, find a random professor working in IT and ask him "Do you have a promising student in one your class, who you can tell is lacking some money to get a good equipment?"
And I just give it all.
It's a pricey strategy, I am probably forking 700-1000$ every 6 months but I don't really care. Last time I have see a young Thai girl cry because I gave her something should could have never afforded before finishing university. Was well worth the price.
And I am not compromising anymore with my own setup, so I have to buy at least 1-2 monitor.
The biggest problem we had was buying the stuff to begin with, as we needed a car rental to carry it all and a day trip to the nearest city with an Ikea and a big box store to source it. (And we couldn't find a UK keyboard anywhere!) Most of those we sold it all to didn't have a car to begin with.
I think Covid and WFH have changed the need here, as what might once have been a week's working holiday has now morphed into a 4 month working break.
I don't see a contender popping up anytime soon, as the business would probably thrive best in a location that doesn't attract startups. Costa del Sol rather than Silicon Valley.
If you're a professional on high income and living in a low-income country, this might help others more than you will ever realise.
It’s restless legs, but it happens in deep sleep, when you’re unaware it’s happening.
Sleep apnea has tons of tech built up to help with the problem. Smart connected CPAPs that monitor your sleeping for you, for example.
But for periodic limb movements in deep sleep the specific need of tracking limb movements is not well covered. My sleep doctor suggested putting a fit bit on my ankle. This sort of works, but not well.
With such a large potential market, and totally plausible movement sensing products, I’m surprised more companies haven’t gotten specifically into limb movement monitoring during sleep.
- Confirming that's why I'm groggy in the AM, and not some other reason
- which limbs are moving, which can help for targeted treatment (stretching, magnesium cream, etc)
No app, parents and caregivers have to become the therapist. Depends on your child's age but these are the resources we used:
https://teachmetotalk.com/ https://www.hanen.org/
> The closest app is $200 just to show him flashcards and says an audio clip
Could you please provide the app(s)? We use this one every now and then:
For example, it would automatically recognize the five different email signatures I type often and make them accessible by typing, say, ”xxsig” followed by pressing TAB to cycle through the five signatures. I would also want it to learn how I write docstrings and generate templates that I could access via another keyword.
for example :
- trigger: ":date"
replace: "{{mydate}}"
vars:
- name: mydate
type: date
params:
format: "%m/%d/%Y"
I also found this one https://www.autohotkey.com/ but I haven't tried it yet.
I did eventually post the code on github, though it's missing most of its history, and the work is stalled out mid-transition from one code generator backend to another, so it doesn't actually run; but you can get a sense of the language style from the 'samples' and 'validation' directories:
https://github.com/marssaxman/radian
In a nutshell, name-rebinding and an indirection operator provided the flavor of a mutable, object-oriented language over immutable datastructures and functional semantics. Loops were all range-based, and the dataflow graph was decomposed into maps & reduces; maps were applied in parallel, via work-stealing.
Were I to do it over again, I might be a little less opinionated about the syntax - but I was having fun at the time.
There are way too many good songs on there that will never hit more mainstream platforms and be recognized by Shazam.
As Douglas Adams said: It is somebody elses problem.
Being watched by someone who knows you're supposed to be doing one thing and one thing only can be a great help in refocusing even if one strays a little.