

Experiment HN: Idea Day Results - kyro

Alright folks. Idea day deadline has finally been reached, so let's hear the three (or more) problems/frustrations/annoyances you experienced/overheard/observed today with possible solutions!<p>This is in reference to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937032 for those who are confused.
======
aristus
* No decentralized, redundant, internet archive. Solution? I dunno. I've been banging away at it for years.

* No easy way to search my personal web/reading history. The problem is not just collection, it's relevance. I want to go back and find a book recommendation on design I saw in a blog post sometime in the last week. I dunno where it is or if I bookmarked it. Solution? Google Desktop / WebMynd plus some radically different ideas about search.

* I can't use Amazon EC2 with Mosso CloudFiles quickly, cheaply, and at scale. Solution? Cloud peering.

~~~
jimmybot
I've thought about number two as well. How about a combination of caching all
pages you read and how long you are spending on each page (and maybe if you
scrolled as well)?

The idea is to save enough data that you can have an algorithm that will
automatically differentiate between stuff you closed within a couple of
seconds and didn't really read and stuff that interested you and you actually
read through. And the reason for doing this automatically is it seems very
difficult to have the discipline take an action every time you see a page that
you may want to save so that you can search through again (such as clicking a
box for every such page).

Whatever mechanism it is, it needs to account for stuff read through readers
and over multiple computers/devices too. I don't want to miss a search result
just because I was reading it on an iPhone or in my Google Reader.

Or instead of caching locally, a search interface that would accept a long
list of urls to look through.

~~~
ntoshev
I have thought about it as well. The signals that could determine relevancy in
your browser history are likely different form the ones that determine it for
web search, and measuring engagement with a page is a good example (it would
help web search as well, but it would be harder to measure).

Other things you'd take into account are:

* continuity in time - reading several pages on similar topics one after the other.

* analysis of the subgraph of the web graph that you visited

* you'd be more aggressive with query expansion because you work with much smaller corpus, e.g. you'd want to take hypernyms and hyponyms into account

~~~
jimmybot
Ah yes, engagement is the word. Interesting. I'd imagine the query expansion
should also work across the author dimension--include and rank matches from
the same blog higher, even if according to my history, I haven't read that
post.

------
warwick
* Carpool coordination. This problem turned into our next homework assignment for my collaborative work class. I'm thinking of something that lets each team member mark down their home, adjust it on a per-day basis if they'll be somewhere else, mark down which days they can drive, and plot optimal routes. Extra points for a mobile app that can read my GPS coordinates and tell me where to go. More points if it balances driving responsibilities well enough that nobody feels taken advantage of.

* Too many notifications. I have to login to a half dozen different systems to keep up on what's happening. That's too much. There are notifications I just want to see, some I want to add to my todo list, some to my calendar, some I don't want to see again. A single-app solution for all of this would be brilliant. Email is too heavy: I want notifications, not correspondence. Bonus points if it's on my mobile.

* Some way to extract the most valuable points out of a meeting. A possible solution might be a 'real time digg' that lets people vote speakers up and down when they agree or disagree with their point. Correlate that with a copy of the transcript and emphasize sections with higher scores. Possibly two-dimensional voting for 'We need to remember this' and 'I agree with this'.

~~~
nreece
>> Too many notifications

What sort of notifications? Please share some examples.

~~~
warwick
In addition to the ones that were already mentioned, I also care about:

Class announcements (currently emailed to me)

Reminders from my calendar (currently email or rss'd)

New posts from blogs I follow (currently RSS)

Notification of shared document changes (currently login to each service to
check)

Private messages on forums (currently emailed)

------
vaksel
1\. Startup marketing: should be easier to get a list of all blogs that you
can contact. Also I found that the contact forms are next to impossible to
find on a lot of sites

Solution: site that lets you generate a list of sites to contact. With direct
links to that site's contact us page.

2\. New Season TV updates for basic cable, you know what I'm talking about you
watch a TV channel and they keep repeating the same shows 20 times over.

Solution: site that let's you "follow" a show + channel, and get notifications
when that channels starts airing a new season.

3\. Where are they now? Where are all of those celebrities, politicians,
musicians that have retired from the public eye? What are they doing now?

Solution: IMDB like site for retired personalities. Would show things like,

    
    
       Name: John Doe
       Famous For: Congressman from XX from 19xx-19xx
       Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
       Current Occupation: Lobbyist for ______
    

or

    
    
       Name: James Doe
       Famous For: Actor(Movie #1(amazon link) - Movie #2(amazon link)
       Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
       Current Occupation: retired in Florida, spends his spare time working on his bikes.

~~~
tcarnell
Point 2: You can use Femtoo.com (<http://www.femtoo.com>) to track a webpage
(wikipedia for example) to be notified of new seasons/episodes...

You can be notified by email and Instant Messager (if you register using a
gmail account).

------
tcarnell
A toaster combined with a smoke alarm 'SHOULD' result in a machine that does
not burn toast.

~~~
tocomment
wow that's really clever! I wonder if it's been done. I might try it. Maybe
CO2 detector though? I wouldn't want Americium near my toast ...

------
ntoshev
Understanding written text is a universal problem and even minor improvements
would matter.

Syntax highlighting for natural language is a possible improvement. I have
tried variations of this with no success so far: parts-of-speech tagging in
color doesn't seem to help, for example. Automatic extraction and highlighting
of named entities is probably most promising.

More generally, it's about ways to help humans understand electronic text
better by providing them hints and interactions that were not possible (or
were difficult) with paper.

An established example of this is searching within a page. There are different
implementation of this, some better than others: search-as-you-type is good,
and so is highlighting all results. I haven't yet seen implementations of
query expansion like search engines do: correcting spelling mistakes, finding
all word forms, finding synonyms. Finding several terms close to one another
would also be helpful.

------
niyazpk
1\. Plastic bags are all around.

    
    
       Solution: Make paper bags and sell those. Use less plastic. Spread awareness.
    

2\. Web hosting/downloads (read the solution).

    
    
       Solution: Make all the servers a network of bittorent peers.
       This way load balancing, and bandwidth problems can be solved.
       Downloads can be stopped and resumed.
       After some time the server need not host the file at all.
       There will be virtually no down time.
       If web sites can be served using the bitorrent technology, awesome!
    

3\. I have a lot of old books.

    
    
       Solution: Some web service to exchange old books free of cost.

~~~
djm
The plastic bags problem was solved years ago in many places.

In the Uk and europe (western europe anyway) supermarkets now either (a) don't
let you have them at all, (b) make you pay for them, or (c) let you have them
but make you ask the checkout operator instead of having a bunch that you can
help yourself to.

Most supermarkets are also selling larger more sturdy plastic shopping bags.
These are marketed as a 'green' iniative as using less of the other bags is
supposedly good for the environment.

~~~
caffeine
Here's the UK situation with bags:

The Waitrose near me has makes a half-assed effort, whereby no matter how much
stuff you have (literally, a heaped shopping cart), the lady will look at you
and ask "Do you need a bag?" The idea is that if they ask, sometimes you'll
say no, and use fewer bags. Usually I respond with something like "Nah, I'll
just take the cart, thanks" or "It's fine, I'm a great juggler" or some other
stupid quip.

Marks & Spencer also ask you if you want a bag. If you say yes, they charge
you 10 pence PER bag. So if you do a lot of shopping at M&S, you really need
to bring your own suitcase or something.

Tesco doesn't give a crap. They find baby seals and tie plastic Tesco bags on
their heads.

------
avinashv
* DVD/CD burning: the fact that people still produce coasters in 2009 is a travesty.

* Video authoring: with the complexity of containers, codecs, DVD formats etc. it's still far from what the MP3 was even 6 or 7 years ago, despite iMovie's best efforts.

* Because of the way the Western 12-note musical system is devised, guitars have intonation problems that can never be fully overcome. I found the solution to this about 5 minutes ago: <http://www.truetemperament.com/site/index.php> Quite whacky.

------
tcarnell
The wireless 'Copy and Paste' mouse - click a file or highlighted text, click
a 'copy' button on your mouse and the data is transferred to an SD card in the
mouse... point the mouse at another computer and click the 'paste' button on
the mouse to transfer the data to another PC ... imagine how much time would
be saved instead of uploading/sending files/data using MSN or Skype to send
something to the guy sat next to you... GENIOUS, I should probably patent
this...

------
ujjwalg
1) Home-delivery, inner city parcel service and taxi service having a
centralized system. It will be a B2B and B2C combined together to make things
more efficient

2) Higher cab fares during night time so that drivers have incentives to
operate during night, especially, on friday and saturday nights.

3) Lower medical/insurance costs

~~~
dpcan
I have to strongly disagree with #2 as it will discourage drunk people further
from calling a cab instead of driving home.

There's an idea - Bar Van, free rides home from the bar, completely funded by
advertising from area businesses that want to support "don't drink and drive"
initiatives.

~~~
aquateen
Or for a pizza place: buy a pizza, free ride home.

~~~
matthew-wegner
I've never understood why pizza places don't rent movies.

"Oh crap, I have a late movie sitting here collecting fines. I'll just order
another pizza so they'll pick it up..."

~~~
blang
I saw a local pizzeria do this in the mid 90s. I thought it was a great idea,
but I guess others did not agree with me. The place went out of business and
is now a Dunkin' Donuts.

------
davidw
I occasionally like to give talks at conferences that will have me (thus
proving they're not really very important venues?;-), but you need to be aware
of the conference months ahead of time to submit a talk, and I'm interested in
stuff in different fields. I need a way to learn about conferences and their
submission deadlines.

~~~
tcarnell
You can use <http://www.femtoo.com> for exactly this!

With Femtoo.com you can track events - you can specify what type of event you
are interested in (conferences for example), enter some keywords (Java,
Pottery etc) and when the event is schedules (3 months in advance), you will
be notified.

You can be notified by email, Instant Message, or a URL callback.

When you've logged in, choose to create an 'Event Tracker'...enjoy!

(I sympathize, I built Femtoo to avoid missing concerts of my favourite
bands!)

~~~
kingnothing
Please stop spamming your site all over this thread!

------
bravura
See <http://idea-ne.ws> for a slightly lighter take on new ideas.

~~~
xinsight
All I get is: "502 Bad Gateway"

------
tocomment
Remembering seeing something on the internet years ago and not being able to
find it now. Why can't my computer record every page I visit, everything that
comes across my screen, everything I type, etc? We have the memory.

------
tocomment
New TV series go so wrong. They open up all these story lines and then the
show gets canceled and you're left frustrated and confused. Sarah Conner
chronicles and Kyle XY are two examples.

My solution, a voluntary agency to preapprove tv series to make sure they have
adequate funding and buy in from the network to stay alive until the story
reaches a conclusion, and that the story is coherent and makes sense. Viewers
like me would only watch shows that get this approval.

------
chaosmachine
The random quality of haircuts. Solution: shave it all off the next day.

------
jodrellblank
I kind of put them in the other thread (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937184> )

------
diN0bot
lasers to shoot down mosquitoes and eradicate maleria

better...belief persuasion. existence would be so much less traumatic if
belief in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation could be instilled after
childhood.

for serious this time: ...

nah, who am i kidding. i'm educated, certified, white, and working on my own
startup. i live the most charmed existence imaginable (other than the no
afterlife thing). i think it's better to scratch more worthwhile wounds.

~~~
nl
"Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers"

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html>

