Products I Wish Existed | Hacker News Reader

Products I Wish Existed

medium.com

39 pointsDigitalSea48 comments

"The Reusable Checklist"

Like Microsoft InfoPath? Or pretty much any business software with "workflow" in the feature list.

"E-mail with time function"

Like you can set an "expires" time in e-mails in Outlook?

How many more of these are "things which do exist, but searching for them and finding out about them is actually hard" rather than "things which don't exist at all"?

Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist vocation was a pretty good prediction.

Is the expire time set in Outlook will work in another email server/client like Gmail?

I don't think so. I don't know if it's a standard header, or even what Exchange does with it.

But it has existed in Outlook for a decade or more, so people have been considering this same problem for a long time.

There is no way to comment on these. As pointed out, many of the things exist, but the submitter is merely unaware.

>Email ‘To:’ field randomizer https://medium.com/products-i-wish-existed/5dc3f5cd08ab

For example, it hurts me inside that I cannot tell this guy to use "bcc:"

Bcc is different than what he's describing

Assuming comma separated emails, here is the "product" in Python:

    import random, string
    email_list = "a@b.com, c@d.com".split(', ')
    random.shuffle(email_list)
    print string.join(email_list, ', ')

If the entire recipient list isn't disclosed to the recipients, then there would be no need to randomize it. So, bcc meets his goal of not disclosing the particular order in which he entered the email addresses.

Granted, in rare cases, it is desirable to disclose all recipients' email addresses to each other, but I'd personally prefer it if that were the exception, rather than common practice.

> Granted, in rare cases, it is desirable to disclose all recipients' email addresses to each other

It might be rare for some people's use of email, but it's hardly rare. It's essential if it's group email and others in that group need to be able to chime-in to the rest of the group.

"bcc:" won't work if people need to be able to respond to the group.

but aside from that, I think that he really wants is not just a randomizer, but something that explicitly flags that fact that the 'to' field reflects a random ordering. Otherwise, how are the recipients to know it's a random ordering?

(that's a bit of a simplification, though. It might not be necessary if such randomizers were well-known and/or it became obvious from multiple of someone's group emails that their recipient ordering was random-looking).

wow... 'to randomizer'. That's quite a leap, to infer that because 2 email addresses are next to each other that those two people slept together. I guess my social and professional circles are way too narrow.

Perhaps rather than randomizing, they could be alphabetized? Or... if someone actually writes back in shock that yellowrubberchicken@yahoo.com slept with hownowbrowncow@hotmail.com, just reply back that you have no idea what they're talking about?

Or, yeah, perhaps bcc in some cases if this is that much of a concern in your life?

The countdown looks super awesome. I think we'll build this over the weekend. https://medium.com/products-i-wish-existed/995b0a12ee16 Email me (martin at UpOut dot com) if you're interested in the beta.

I want a Microsoft Excel clone where each formula is replaced with a call to R. Formulas can also be used as array formulas.

Wouldn't this be cool: {=randomForest(A1:A1000,B1:H1000,...)} and out dumps your rf to the selected cells then {=predict(...)} etc.

Pretty sure I'm the only one who wants this.

Username charity sounds exciting to me. We are in early years of user driven web. Imagine what it would be 25 years down the line? I doubt people want to use their real names unless governments across the world regulate Internet and make it mandatory.

I really do love all of these, but I hate knowing that few are viable, and few will ever be real products. "Awesome ideas" are exactly why we built LaunchSky.com -- a tool to quickly and effectively validate if an idea is truly viable (and needed).

If you go to LaunchSky.com now, we've locked off free invites, and have the submissions we'll be using for our launch -- but these are really good.

If the OP or any posters of the ideas on that medium page want a free credit to post it on LaunchSky.com -- email me: Vlad (at) DarwinApps.com and I'll hook it up with a free credit to LaunchSky for you.

Just screenshot the medium.com part of the post and send it from the email you'd like the free credit to go to.

Two hardware products I wish existed but never will:

- an eInk display laptop for text only computing / document creation and max battery life

- 4G basic brick phone + wifi tethering

Never is a long time. 1) Will definitely exist in some form. Perhaps a slate-like device with relatively fast eInk display which you can connect a kb/mouse to. 2) I can see mobile SoC's becoming so cheap that you can probably personally hack together something like that for cheap in a couple of year's time. Then just buy Data from some reseller.

I was under the impression you could get a 4G brick from Sprint and use that as an access point. Unlimited data and all that. Still kind of insanely expensive, though, but hey, companies can own radio frequency.

I want to be able to enter a target dollar amount into a certain date on a calendar, then select a date at a time before that date, and have it calculate how much I have to save each week to reach that target. And have it auto-adjust the weekly amount when I miss a week now & again, or when I save more than the required amount sometimes, too.

Simple.com lets you set goals and automatically sets the right amount of money aside for you to reach that goal at your desired date.

I have 5 invites if anyone needs one.

I would love an invite if you still have one to spare. What do you think of Simple.com so far?

I think it's great. I've always had trouble saving any money always desperately waiting for my next paycheck, and after only two months, I've saved more than I ever have.

It can't really replace a full bank though unless all you do is use a debit card for all your transactions (like me).

Email me at Joseph@JosephRobertBrown.com if you want an invite.

I'm really surprised that integration with external credit cards (and banks, but especially credit cards given their importance in the US) isn't on the top of their priority list. I understand that they'll miss out on the extra data they get by being partnered with their bank, but it would let me drop mint.com with its dated ui, and make it much easier to use the goals mechanism (and daily spending limits would be a lot more relevant). Alternatively they could just launch a Simple credit card, give me 1% cash back / rewards and I'd feel comfortable moving most of my spending onto their card, which would let me continue to maintain my credit score and extract a bit of that merchant fee.

related: http://www.halfbakery.com

The jpg format supports all kinds of textual metadata, so "write on the back of my photo" is theoretically a solved problem. I'm surprised to hear that there aren't mobile apps that make editing that metadata easy.

http://www.photometadata.org/meta-resources-field-guide-to-m...

Yup there's already a field which could do the job just not quickly editable in your phone's camera app.

Metadata for pictures is solved (mostly) aka IPTC. Now videos, OTOH, not so much. It's still pretty much a wild, wild west out there for that.

Google Notes!

That would be heaven for me. I've been trying to do notes via Evernote and while it is fine and feature rich, it is not a good performer. There's no way to just open app and take notes!

Google used to have a product called "Google Notebook" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Notebook). They've since closed it down, but I used to be an extremely heavy user.

That article horrifies me.

People are already putting every question they have into Google. Every email they send and receive. Every video they watch on YouTube.

Putting every little thought into a service by Google is just a horrifying thought.

Google Scratchpad Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scratchpad/kjebfhg...

Trying to keep ordered notes via Evernote is definitely more difficult that one would expect.

My current solution is OneNote for skydrive.com + Microsoft's OneNote Android app which performs pretty well.

Things I wish sites would stop doing: changing articles on horizontal scroll events. Makes my laptop nub scroll completely unusable without jetting across 3+ articles.

At least part of the answer for "Unsubscribe to junk snail mail" exists - https://www.catalogchoice.org/

"Glamera" too, http://www.google.com/glass/

I'd just like the "Time Stopper", a lot of the rest of these could be solved without any effort if that existed.

So does the self-destructing email, and a few others.

The idea that interests me most is Uber for food. The number of times I've wanted Mexican food only to discover my local store doesn't deliver and my clothes stink so I don't want to go outside, too many times too count.

I bet there are number of startups already working on it. We have tons of startups (in last couple of years) that are 'airbnb" and 'uber' for some different problem.

Check out Seamless (http://www.seamless.com/) or do a TaskRabbit/Exec to get somebody to pick up the food for you.

Edit: Verified that the seamless link worked; don't know why that caused problems for you.

That Seamless link didn't seem to work for me and as for those task services I wouldn't trust them for food. A service with guaranteed time delivery, service you can rely on is what would sell it for me.

seamless, grubhub, eat24. There are lots of such services.

I want that badly. Almost badly enough to just make it my business.

You might want to consider doing laundry more than once a year, but until then: http://www.postmates.com/getitnow

I've really been pleased with PaperKarma. https://www.paperkarma.com/

Especially as I move often, I really enjoy having the ability to stop promotional mail from the previous tenants.

I thought it pretty amusing when I half completed the sign up with CatalogChoice.com and they've sent me emails regularly for the past few weeks.

Great article, I should keep a similar list for the ideas I have

Medium just became an interesting site. It's @ev's new project? Wow. Decent design, and lots of cool collections of articles. Check the home page.

Huh, I've been playing around with a shared reusable checklist thing. "Trello for checklists". Everyone's thinking the same thing as usual!

I like all the email related ideas. I hope someone is implementing them. Anyone want to partner for self destructing email?

No form for readers to submit their own?

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