Ask HN: What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?
PG mentioned this question in his most recent essay, so I am redirecting it to everyone on HN. What does your company (or you individually) need that you would play a lot of money for?
Why big corporations can get away with this? It comes down to people. Little guy working at tax office doesn't have enough confidence to oppose Apple or Google but will have world of confidence to scrutinize unknown small businesses.
I see companies like this popping up all the time offering services that allow profits to be concealed under some bullshit scheme. It might take a few years before tax authority will catch up but they will eventually find every single client of such company, they will conduct detailed audits and will issue new tax bills with penalties to all involved.
I specifically said, tax authority won't accept tax deductions they don't like. They will simply issue you new tax bill and couldn't care less whether what you are doing is legal or not.
It's up to you to challenge their interpretation of law through legal system if you think what you are doing is legal.
By the way, EU’s executive Commission is currently looking into Ireland and says what Apple is doing could be illegal under EU law. If confirmed, Apple will get a huge repayment bill.
source: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/is-the-apple-tax-dod...
Just to put this in perspective, Meditech allows users (ie: non-technical medical personnel) to write their own "programs" for retrieving and organizing information in something called "Meditech Magic." Here's a clip:
BEERv1.1,
100^b,T("")^#,DO{b'<1 NN(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall")^#,
N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer!")^#,
N("You take one down, pass it around,")^#,b-1^b,
N(b,"bottle"_IF{b=1 " ";"s "}_"of beer on the wall!")^#},
END;A drop in "replacement" that creates a web-based UI for easy creation and retrieval of Meditech data would be very useful. It could communicate with the system and translate javascript into MMagic. Bonus points if it could translate already existing applications automatically. Time to see if Meditech has an API I can access from javascript.
OT: I took a look at your projects page and I have to say I like the cut of your jib, sir.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...
I should warn it is very early days and there is still a lot to do and a long list of todos to complete but if you want to try it out send me an email(in my profile) and I'll set you up with a free account.
PG asked, "What do you need that you'd pay a lot for?" in relation to changing sales discussions with the hope of bringing in some revenue for struggling startups. The problem with taking this a bit too literally is it's essentially the same thing as asking a customer what they want. The classic statement from Henry Ford is, "If I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me a faster horse." Often, the customer may not know what they want.
Instead of asking "What you'd pay a lot for?" you could ask "Where are you spending lots?" or "What costs you a lot?" One of my favorites is, "What regular task in your job annoys the ever living snot out of you? Yeah, what's that thing you absolutely dead doing?"
What annoys you?
What do you dread doing?
What infuriates you?
What upsets you?
...
Take care of all my trivial stuff for me. Bills, taxes, money management, politics, corruption and other stupid distractions that stop me from focusing on people that matter.
How much do you want?
Small firms mostly lack the wide scale of knowledge required to do said things.
For prices: I know a certain B4-firm asks around EUR 450 (USD 550?) for a single tax return. Extrapolate from there ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)
More seriously though: do you have a link? I find this concept seriously intriguing / weird / ... on many levels.
The only way to live without politics or corruption and have fully automated taxation is probably to establish a nation run by a Friendly AI. No such nation exists today but you may increase the likelihood of one existing in the future by supporting Friendly AI research.
You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).
a business of lifestyle, if you will.
I wouldn't be able to throw money at you fast enough.
I just threw those examples together in order to illustrate the idea that I have too much information for my puny brain to keep track of. I'm sure that there are apps to solve every information management problem that a person could have, but using all of them would create the new problem of learning to use and maintain N different apps.
Is there anything specific that you need that current services don't provide?
First category: Golf equipment, expensive knifes, barbecue stuff, wine, shoes etc.
Second category: Taxes, cleaning, medicine, everything which lets one appear to be a better parent (does not matter if it actually does) etc.
Wouldn't pay "a lot" for it, maybe $10-20/month, but I'd like some sort of "learning framework" software. I imagine it would be a clever combination of Anki/Mnemosyne (but modern and web-based), note-taking software like Evernote, bookmarking similar to Pocket, and maybe some basic reminders/tasks that I can schedule. Disclaimer: I've put no more than ~5 minutes of thought into this total.
Someone said [legal] "tax evasion" as a service. I'd pay for that. As a contractor I've set up an LLC for myself, and I'm sure I'm missing out on lots of elementary tricks that could save me money. I actually have a meeting set up with a tax guy later this week, but my intuition is that if a company figured out how to scale this, it could be cheaper and more effective. I'd be willing to pay a % of the money saved if it's substantially more than what I've been able to do on my own.
Office hours with experts. I'd pay upwards of $200/hr to be able to schedule time to speak with certain experts. I doubt I'd use it more than a few times a year, but that's still a lot of money.
Some sort of automated personal assistant that coaxes me to do the things I need to do without a lot of manual input on my part. It's been tried many times and it's tough to do, but if someone gets it right, I'd pay a lot.
[1] https://helpouts.google.com/ [2] https://www.airpair.com/
Just show me what you have. It doesn't have to be an app.
> Once you're more comfortable with basic web programming
Don't use the word BASIC! Simple, Basic, Easy, Quick are all still denigrating their effort and experience.
Take care of all the messy details of my life. Bills, big events (like a wedding), group traveling. Would pay compared with a 3rd party's service fee.
1) weather analysis
I'm a hang glider pilot, but this applies to all wind sports – windsurfing, kiteboarding, paragliding, sailplanes, possibly even surfing and skydiving.
These sports require weather analysis. Is the wind blowing from the right direction? Is the cloudbase high enough?
Some weather analysis tools exist like http://www.xcskies.com/ for hang gliding and paragliding, but they're not perfect to say the least.
I still spend too much time looking at various charts and forecasts in the summer, and then waiting on site once I arrive and the weather conditions aren't right. If you can make me wait less on my precious weekend time, you have my money.
Participants of these sports pretty much accept the current level of technology to be as good as it gets, because there are very few meteorologists who could create new, better weather models, and at the same time be either interested in doing that for free or have the technical and business acumen to make it a business. So pretty much everyone uses the RASP model and weather data off many disparate websites.
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2) flight instruments
Hang gliders, paragliders and sailpane pilots use special devices that combine a variometer with GPS and some stored map data to record flight paths, show airspeed, descent rate, etc. These are small, like a fat iPhone 6+ with a calculator-style screen.
The company producing the most popular ones is Flytec. I'm not sure how they get away with selling a simple device that runs on two AA batteries for $400-$1000. Maybe they have some key patents... though they are not a monopolist, there's FlyMaster for example. Flytec's devices are pretty much the same as those they were selling 10 years ago, they are cheap to make and should not cost that much.
There's room in the market for a significantly cheaper and/or more magical device. By magical I mean stuff like "go this way to get into the lifting air you've just lost", or "fly faster/slower to maximize glide ratio".
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3) weather mapping drone
When the wind hits the mountain / ridge at a certain angle, hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes can easily soar next to that mountain. The wind also needs to be in a certain speed range etc.
Sometime we pilots want to check if that mountain over there could be flyable. It looks like it might be soarable, but to verify this, we need to drive up the mountain and launch a live person in a glider from there. That's a huge waste of time, and because often such roads are privately owned, there's a lot of hassle in getting permission to do that. Landowners are afraid of the liability (which we legally waive but it takes time to explain and verify), and we don't even know if the mountain is soarable at all, we can only guess.
It would be nice if we could just launch a drone which would fly around and record wind direction and speeds at various locations and altitudes.
The same technique could also be used to better understand existing flying sites, OR to find thermals (invisible pockets of uprising air which gliders need to stay up in the air for long period of time). And this is #1 thing we want – more found thermals, more airtime.
So maybe it can be a sort of follow-drone that flies in your general area, telling you where the thermals are. You can tell you're in a thermal once you actually fly into it, but you're descending at 3 ft per second, so the amount of time you can fly searching for thermals is limited.
Because you're flying a glider, the follow-drone can be a glider too with just a small auxiliary engine, you don't need too much battery power.
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So there you have it. Wind sports are technologically underserved because the market size isn't very big, but the pain is real, and it's #1 reason preventing more people from participating. Maybe some of the weather / hardware solutions you develop might also be applicable in other fields. Maybe you already have a solution that is fairly easily adjustable to wind sports (esp. drones).
Here's the site story (in cartoon form):-
http://www.seabreeze.com.au/Members/Welcome/Cartoon.aspx
And a sample page:-
A couple serious questions though:
1. Would glider-pilot software running on a smart phone, possibly with an attached sensor, be a viable replacement for the Flytec devices?
2. How do you feel about angle-of-attack indicators? Do hang gliders have a good place to mount them, and then wire them back to a display?
2. AoA is too low-level for me personally. I'd rather see my airspeed and glide ratio relative to the air. Hang gliders stabilize themselves at an optimal AoA if you stop providing inputs, but sometimes when I'm desperately trying to reach the landing field I want to know if I should increase or decrease the speed to get there (tradeoff between headwind penetration and sink rate).
Also, personally I'm not going to install anything requiring long wires. There's just too much hassle already in setting up a hang glider... I just want to put the whole device with any sensors in clean airflow and forget about it.
Oh, one more thing I would like is a G-force meter. I'm not supposed to exceed 4G positive on my glider, but I have no idea how it feels like. I'm not going to reach it with normal flying but once I start doing wingovers and loops, I would like to know the numbers I'm getting.
Lack of such hang glider is #1 reason preventing willing people from hang gliding. The popularity of paragliding is proof of that (a paraglider packs into a big backpack). You can't store a hang glider in an apartment because normally it packs into a 5 meter long sausage bag. And I can't even go travel with my hang glider because where do I leave it when I sleep in the hotel? Too risky to leave it on top of car. A small package also allows flying at some ski resorts and other perks.
Designing this hang glider would be primarily solving a configuration problem – how to arrange all required components so that they are foldable and yet strong enough. You have 40 years of HG designs to get inspired from, and don't forget Princeton sailwing, that's an old, under-recognized concept imho.
By the way, hang gliders are small enough that you can truck-test them on the ground to make sure they're strong enough and have proper stability attributes. Unmanned flight testing should also be possible, though not done currently. HGMA even has a list of certification criteria online that you can use as a baseline. What I'm saying is that designing hang glider is easier than designing a Boeing. You do need to know what you're doing, but you don't need a team of PhDs in fluid dynamics and materials science. All important hang glider components are free to use, not covered by current patents.
I have no experience with hang gliders, but as long as you have rigid skeleton you have problems with trasport and storage. Could this skeleton be replaced with an inflatable one?
It won't work on paragliders because as ram-air wings, they need to collapse when they get unloaded. Otherwise once unloaded the wing will fall over in front of the pilot and probably get entangled with the pilot.
The only heavier-than-air inflatable aircraft currently in production is the Woopy – http://fly.woopyjump.com/ – its design is very unconventional, with continuously running pumps and some weird flight control mechanism. It never passed certification because it's probably not as strong as other hang gliders.
Some potential problems of inflatable hang gliders:
* Ambient air pressure differences at varying altitudes, temperatures, etc.
* Bird attack – sometimes eagles and other birds can get aggressive and try to claw a hang glider. What is a minor annoyance now could be a dangerous flaw if your glider is inflatable.
* A failed inflatable wing can potentially gift-wrap around the pilot preventing them from throwing the reserve parachute in time.
* Less rigidity than metal tubes – danger of buckling at higher speeds / wing-loading.
* There's a certain stigma among HG pilots regarding the concept of inflatable aircraft due to controversy around Woopy and the general idea of riskiness.
However, inflatable aircraft IS a practical strategy. The shortcomings listed above can be overcome given enough effort.
For example, see http://www.prospective-concepts.ch/html/site_en.htm – click on Projects / Air / Pneuwing (and other projects).
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodyear_Inflatoplane
Lastly, in all likeliness the only advantage of an inflatable hang glider would be portability. I don't think it will end up lighter than a tube+fabric construction. The guys from Prospective Concepts seem to believe that they will achieve better glide performance with an inflatable design, but to be honest I doubt that. But then again, they know much more about their technology than I do.
About the paragliders: you mean when they land? It is true that the landing becomes more challenging, especially in case of wind (kitesurfers often help each other when entering / exiting). But I guess this could be solved - if nothing else, only the central area could be "reinforced". Let's wait a few years, I'm sure someone will try it. :)
Normally a ram-air paraglider wing would collapse at low angle of attack due to lack of pressure inside the wing (it only works in a certain range of angles of attack), causing both the wing and the pilot to start falling, picking up speed and restoring angle of attack, and re-inflating again. It's kinda hard to explain concisely in more detail.
With a rigid inflated paraglider wing however, if the angle of attack becomes too low, the wing might get unloaded (falls faster than the pilot) and will pitch down even further because that's what a plank wing does in the absence of pendulum weight provided by the pilot. So the wing dives down and gets entangled with either the pilot, the lines or both.
I'm a bit rusty on the exact aerodynamics of paragliders because I only fly hang gliders, but this is roughly what happens.
If you want to know more about how ram-air paraglider wings stay inflated, check out this doc – http://downloads.flyozone.com/pdf/PG/ozone_shark_nose_en.pdf – it talks about a new ram-air intake technology and explains how ram air wings work.
Why I am doing this at 5 AM..? I'm insane.
eg - If I am in OBX, NC, I don't need a site that has weather data in CA or FL. There may be slight benefits to this, but I can't think of anything big enough that would make it easy to take over a site that is already popular with the locals of a region.
Am I missing some benefits that come from being larger?
Example of a weather model I'm talking about – RASP http://www.drjack.info/DRJACK/RASP/index.html – many hang gliding clubs run this model on local weather data, e.g. http://www.canadarasp.com/RASPtable.html. That's the best forecasts we can have. Well, that and http://xcskies.com.