Experiment HN: Idea day | Hacker News Reader

Experiment HN: Idea day

86 pointskyro59 comments

The world is full of problems that need solving. They're all around us. I'd say we run into at least 5 frustrations every day, whether those are frustrations we experience first hand or ones we overhear others complaining about, but we probably don't think much of them. So let's train our eyes/ears to recognize them!

So how about for the next day, November 12th, we try and pick up on 3 potential problems/complaints/frustrations we see ourselves and/or others facing. At 8PM Pacific time, I'll post another thread where we can all share our findings and possible solutions.

I figured it'd be a good way to get into the habit of recognizing problems, because really, no problem is too small.

What do you think?

EDIT: Some are saying that there are problems that just can't be solved ( a terribly attitude! ) like traffic lights, etc. Maybe then keep your problems to ones that can be solved within reason, like with a capable team.

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Finding doctors is a huge problem. When you move to a new city, you are given a list of 2000 PCPs and told to pick one (after calling around to see if they are accepting new patients). When you need to see a specialist, you are given a referral. People in the health care industry know that many of the specialists are untalented losers who push patients in and out as quickly as possible, and would never let someone close to them see them. The general public has little idea.

http://www.docmatcher.com/

Angie's list includes doctor opinions. I have never used it for that personally so I cannot exactly recommend it but I find them useful for other service providers.

hourtown.com (now bookfresh.com) might address this

Not US centric, but http://www.revahealth.com/

a lot of problems can't really be fixed with software...

- corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

- nagging girlfriend

- traffic congestion (well maybe some software here might help)

- stupid shitty and cold weather

- an IT department that's incompetent

- annoying neighbors

- etc...

If only software solved everything.

I don't know what you're talking about...I made software to fix the "nagging girlfriend" problem.

oh suhail, do share with the class. and mixpanel.com does not count ;)

Laundry

http://laundryview.com

At all the MIT dorms.

and at Georgia Tech as well.

and the WPI ones.

Just curious, how does it work? Would Mac-Gray be having sensors that report back to a controller?

Wow, beyond the dorms, I would love this in my bldg.

> - corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

Workflow, BPM, and Project Management software can go a long way to help avoid most meetings altogether. Then the meetings that do take place can be more productive.

Well...

PROBLEM: corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

SOFTWARE: Collaboration software. If everyone is informed, meetings don't have to happen.

PROBLEM: nagging girlfriend

SOFTWARE: Tweet often and have them sent to her phone. All she really wants is a leash, this should do the trick.

PROBLEM: traffic congestion

SOFTWARE: I already check my city's online webcams of traffic before I have to go somewhere congested so I know what route to take.

PROBLEM: stupid shitty and cold weather

SOFTWARE: See Superman 3. It'll happen, don't worry.

PROBLEM: an IT department that's incompetent

SOFTWARE: yosho must work for the man... are you sure the problem isn't between the keyboard and the chair? ;)

PROBLEM: annoying neighbors

SOFTWARE: Damn. I got nothing. After all that, you win.

>PROBLEM: corporate meetings that accomplish nothing

Well, I work from home, meetings happen on IRC or conference calls. Now, this being news.ycombinator.com, remember that when you launch your own startup, being "the boss" gives you the power to summon and dispel meetings at will! :)

>PROBLEM: nagging girlfriend

High-maintenance relationships aren't a fact of life, they're choices. It's only a problem if you want it to be.

> PROBLEM: traffic congestion > PROBLEM: stupid shitty and cold weather

Telecommuting make these seem a lot less threatening :)

> PROBLEM: an IT department that's incompetent > PROBLEM: annoying neighbors

Well, I don't really have a solution for these. Sometimes you just gotta work with less-qualified-than-we'd-hoped-for people, and you also gotta live somewhere.

I take those as facts of life, and then you have to decide what mindset you'll take on when dealing with those "problems".

Realizing you too can be annoying and also incompetent in a number of things can surely add some perspective do it.

Group birthday cards where there's always a few people secretly signing the card a couple of minutes before it's given to the guest of honour...

How about a global effort to achieve post-scarcity? (The quicker the better.)

Before I go on with the steps, let me remind you all how far we've come in the past fifty years: We have the internet. All electronically-reproducible data is now virtually post-scarcity.

We are also on the cusp of everyone owning a high-performance personal-fabrication machine. Twenty years from now, You will be printing (or pirating) all manner of toys, tools, and electronic devices. The Reprap (and even laser printers) can print circuits right now. Printing an iPod isn't too far off. How much longer until we're printing meat and vegetables? Welcome to the future, everyone.

Step One: Make the populace care. Without a culture that encourages learning, diligence, and scholastic achievement, Step Two is irrelevant.

Step Two: Educate the populace. Better public schools and libraries, and more time spent studying at home.

Step Three: Divert investment and time from more frivolous pursuits.

It's 3:30 in the morning, so I might not have said all that with optimal clarity, but you get the gist of it. Everything will be free soon; let's make it happen faster.

We need cheaper means of producing and reusing raw materials, we need really fantastic nanotech, and ... tons of other crap. I'm going to bed now before I make an ass of myself :)

Step 1 cannot be done. Step 2 is very, very hard. Step 3 cannot be done.

Good luck :)

Yeah, I guess I need to offset those steps by one, and insert Step One: Become Dictator.

How surprising that no reply mentions a child-like approach to the world: curious, inquisitive, playful, fun-seeking.

I believe the simple and sad reason most people won't recognize problems or unaddressed issues around them is because they've been trained not to.

It's called "education", and is a double-edged sword. It'll take you places, but then it'll take places away from you, too, if you're not aware. The very places you need to "think out of the box".

The brain will stick with "what works" and "what's often used", but great insights and breakthroughs don't come from the masses, but rather from individuals exploring the less-traveled paths.

As Pablo Picasso says, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

Funny things, a child asks "why? why? what if?" and most people won't pay attention. Then a bearded grownup asks "why? why? what if?" and gets to be called a visionary!

Have fun!

One thing I've been doing is keeping an annoyance diary. Haven't come up with any great ideas yet though.

Is it online?

It is not, though I've tweeted at least one annoyance.

That's an excellent observation, frustration really is key to sensing where the world can be improved.

The problem is that one mans frustration is another mans income, so it would probably be easier to limit this frustration guide to those areas where you are not going to be facing opposition right away.

On the other hand that might cut off fruitful avenues and maybe we shouldn't be that timid about this.

Thanks for the idea, looking forward to that other thread and I'll do my best to think about your challenge while going through the day.

1) Wanted to quickly test something with a Japanese IE6, after a few hours still haven't done it. Had to evaluate VMWare, Parallels etc. and also hunt for suitable image. Too much work and too costly for just a simple check.

2) If I want to play some new game at 30+ fps, what kind of machine do I need to buy?

From a friend:

1) Printer didn't work. They never do.

2) Too cold to be outside.

3) Takes too long to know if your recombinant bacteria genetic modification failed or not.

Another thing I've been thinking about is how can we learn more about problems in other domains. For this idea day, my frustrations would probably be dev-related, but what about the problems people have in professions other than coding?

That's actually what I meant. It's not supposed to be developer specific. I was thinking about problems you may experience as you get ready to head to work, hear others complain about on the train ride over, or from those eating in the booth next to you at lunch, etc etc etc.

Good idea.

Bad idea: tossing your cousin Penny into a fountain to make a wish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PhzrmBgMI

Traffic lights are totally fixable, there's just a huge amount of legacy hard and software systems. Ten years, better tracking systems, and some fuzzy logic. Problem solved.

Don't forget the political/social implications of convincing the world's population that these need to be changed.

Reminded me of this one: http://xkcd.com/277/

Unknown or expired link.

This should be fixed.

I was going to say that there are several Firefox plugins to check links on the page for you, but the ones that I took a cursory glance at look like they could really slow down your browsing, or automatically "click" on links (like Delete or Upvote/Downvote) that you really don't want them to click.

So I see now that this problem is indeed a little more complicated then that. What we really need is a plugin that makes a quick query to a central service every time you hit a page and checks to see if anyone else has "reported" bad links on that page, and if they have it will highlight them or cross them out for you. Or it could send a list of all of the links on a page to the server and check them against the servers bad links list. Other than that it will let you do your own thing until you hit a bad link on a page, at which time it will look back at your history and see what page the bad link exists on and "report" that bad link/page to the central server so that any other user that hits that page will know before they click that that particular link is bad. There would be, of course, numerous privacy concerns, but I think that if a company was willing to really "do no evil" and could garner enough user support to make it effective this could turn out to be really helpful.

Thoughts?

There's "Resurrect Pages" for Firefox, which has buttons for Google cache (for recently dead pages) and archive.org (for longer-dead pages). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2570

I think he means the situation where if you are browsing HN, then take a trip to Mars and after you continue clicking, the links no longer work.

I think I spend all damn day whinging (mostly in my head) about problems that nobody else will fix for me. Anything and everything from the lack of software I want to the poor design of my headphones to the stupidity of traffic lights. 90% of everything is rubbish and nothing is perfect. Problems problems problems, they're endemic, and OK.

I think that if you cultivate this habit without also driving yourself to fix problems, it will just make you miserable and grouchy. Avoid if possible.

It'll drive you miserable and grouchy if you think of them as petty annoyances. Thinking of them as opportunities for improvement is more healthy.

People here don't know who you are, Mongoose. Why don't you put a link to "Rules for my unborn son" in your profile? Amazing site.

http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/

What? I'm not affiliated with 1001 rules for my unborn son.

I have the opposite problem. I am happy and optimistic. I think long and hard about problems to solve - with a notepad in hand - and can't think of (m)any. So, it will help if you share the problems you have thought of.

I'm not happy and optimistic and I see problems everywhere. What do you want - things that annoy me on a national scale? On an industry-wide scale? Personally? Things that could be solved with small amounts of software? Large software? Website?

Problem 1: There's too much software. I can't learn it all. Why do I still have no better way to take a quick poll around the office than sending everyone an email and having everyone reply (too much email), or creating a custom website (too much effort)? Related: I think Microsoft Infopath might help but I don't know and all I can find about it quickly is marketing waffle - why isn't it easier for me to find out if a given program will help me and how to use it? Related: often when whinging online someone replies with a program that might help, yet when I try to search in advance I just get spam shareware download sites offering the top 20,000 shareware programs that might help and no way to find good ones. This is related to the problem of the sheer amount of software in the iPhone Appstore. Which are the games I might want to play?

Problem 2: I have cool ideas that I don't have enough interest to learn all the things I would need to know to put them together. The asterisk phone system has awful call logging. The MIT simile project is nice. It would be good to have an ajaxy javascript timeline call log with clickable links to replay the call recordings using e.g. the embeddable yahoo flash media player, searchable (preferably with speech recognition). All doable, maybe not even a lot of work for a full time html/css/javascript coder with asterisk knowledge.

A script that runs as a cron job and saves router and switch configs to a DVCS system with a front end like github crossed with django-admin. Sounds simple enough, great for an open source project. http://www.tadasoft.com/ have made a program that costs $10,000 for 500 devices per year just to do this. Problems: faffing with SSH, telnet and secure password storage and custom firewalls with weird interfaces and learning enough about everything to make it workable.

Summary: Finding good software is hard, creating good software is hard, plugging existing software together is hard. I don't know if there's a solution in a better form of online tutorials/examples, a more forgiving/higher level scripting setup, more standard kind of interfaces, other. What I would typically expect is a smug reply saying "math is hard" or "suck it up". Wow, helpful.

Problem 3: I need to work on a project with someone from another company. Why is there nothing in the space between Microsoft Project backed by Sharepoint libraries (huge and complex) and Basecamp (tiny and not locally installable)?

Also related to problem 1: If there is software out there, what is it? Also related to someone elses reply here: Use workflow software. Great! I'd love some that isn't as enterprisey as Microsoft CRM. A small program that half a dozen people can install, that spots each other by Bonjour and ... keeps track of internal projects so I don't have to by hand.

Musing: Visio is unpleasant to draw diagrams with but the results are good. Being able to sketch on paper and have the sketch turned into a visio diagram would be cool - rough circles turned into neat ones, rough lines into neat connections, this symbol into a server, that one into a building.

I don't want "tries to explore the network and draw a diagram for me", or "draw on the web and export in visio format", but I do want "get the same or similar results with less hassle".

We have very powerful graphics cards and decent AJAX-y web sites. Why are my network diagrams like on-screen-paper? (I use this analagously to 'writing Java in Python'). Why aren't they more 3D, more interactive, more searchable more animated, more ... multiplayer, more like the Windows pipes screensaver?

When someone calls me and tells me they have a problem with a program I don't use, why can't I go to a website, find the program and see clickable screenshots of all the key areas so I can guide them to the settings they need?

Remote controlling a computer is slow a lot of the time. For support work I could get use out of a program that just screenscrapes text and shows it to me in the relative positions. i.e. turning a screenshot into a lighter weight balsamiq style sketch outline + text.

Whine whine whine ... you get the picture!

Wait! In case you don't get the picture...

www.autotrader.co.uk is a rubbish site to search for cars if you know what you're looking for. I have a car in mind and can only narrow it down to about 400 at a time. I can't exclude based on keywords, can only search on one keyword which doesn't work at all well when it's a number, can't add notes to them, and if I come back tomorrow I have to trawl through them all again, I can't exclude any. Their recent redesign is uglier, slower and less pleasant to use.

It's ripe for a startup to nip in and take their market.

More generally, there's got to be a better way of pulling what I want out of their database than the two alternatives of a complex and scary search command line (that is, scary for most users), a massive 'advanced search' form or a limiting basic search form. Some nice search/filter/exclude interface.

Also, /etc is the place for linux config files, except for some apps where that isn't good enough so you get stuff like /etc/httpd/conf which is the config file location with in the httpd config file location within the config file location. Or /etc/sysconfig which is the place where system configuration goes within the place where system configuration goes. Stop being so stupid and redundant. Nobody (read: me) wants to deal with that. Put everything in /etc and maybe /etc/httpd if you need to group by program which you shouldn't because filenames are almost certain to be good enough and you can filter using ls anyway didn't you get the message about simplicity and composability of commands?

And what about a program I can run and it takes the running program which has the focus and draws on some overlays over the buttons and menus, such that when I click on them it takes me to some useful help on the web? So I can go to Tools -> Options and run this program, then click on "enable the frobnicator" and it whisks me off to a website where people can talk about what the frobnicator does and where it's useful and what problems it causes. All to often at the moment if there is any help with a program like that it just says "enables or disables the frobnicator".

"Musing: Visio is unpleasant to draw diagrams with but the results are good. Being able to sketch on paper and have the sketch turned into a visio diagram would be cool - rough circles turned into neat ones, rough lines into neat connections, this symbol into a server, that one into a building."

In fact, I was working on this exact same idea for a while some time ago and shelved it when I found it to be difficult :) Do you think that this is something people would pay for?

[Please consider listing your email in your profile]

I have never sold software, and search out free alternatives so that I don't have to buy it whenever possible, so I couldn't say without completely guessing.

On the other hand, I'm continuously surprised what people will pay for, so ... possibly.

[Please consider listing your email in your profile]

I considered and decided against it (hence: it's not there :)). Email is a bit ... awkward.

this sounds like a potential startup, unless anyone knows of a site like this

http://idea-ne.ws/

I've been there many times and the ideas just aren't good. Seriously, a "jump to conclusions mat?" It was funny the first time i heard it, but to be the number one item on the site this long makes it look like a farce.

Jump to Conclusions Mat is a reference to the movie Office Space. It's a great movie you should check out some time.

Ugh. I know. But it's a joke and the fact that everyone there takes it seriously means they aren't serious. It's a waste of time. If the site is trying to be a funny place to go talk about stupid ideas, then it succeeds, but if it's trying to be a serious place to talk about real ideas, then it fails.

That's all I'm saying.

I think the real problem with a site like that is that many people like to guard the tractable problems they think of. It's one thing to talk about your ideas and get critiqued with close friends, it's quite another to post it on the public internet!

Edit: Changed "this" to "that" so it doesn't sound like it's referring to HN

Exactly. If you want a jokey ideas site, there's the Half-Bakery. With this ideas site, I was hoping for HN but covering spare ideas alone.

Idea for this site: up/down voting decrements ones karma points. It is not related with the concept of the karma, but we do not have live-span values here.

Good thinking, I'll try to do it.

I'm still waiting for my flying car....

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comics/103.png

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