Ask HN: What problems do you have that could be solved using software? - humaninstrument
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itamarst
People keep asking this question. Why are you asking it? Is it an attempt to
start a business? If so, I suggest going to
[https://stackingthebricks.com/](https://stackingthebricks.com/) and reading
everything. You'll do much better than asking random people on the internet.

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anotheryou
A statistics tool for dummies that always responds live to any input/change
and holds your hand to avoid pitfalls and suggest what's possible. Beyond
other things it should enable this:

\- choose what you roughly want to display (e.g. values over time)

\- throw some data at it

\- it auto-detects file format, dates, values, table headers

\- it shows a live parsing preview, maybe even a rough plot

\- you can tweak the selection, but more interactively than with regex and
with a live preview by highlighting within a few example rows of your data

\- plot some nice, live tweakable graphs, starting from presets

\- guide through some basic transformations to do (like filtering)

\- enable to update the source data

\- export images or html

\- for more exessive logs I'd whish to have quick filtering. If I log and tag
every click of a user on my website I might for example want to select
behaviours within the first week of registering (account created at XY, active
within XY etc, clicks on the settings menu, sort by most clicked and display
"button label")

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cdiamand
I ask this question a lot and have put together a few resources.

daily newsletter:

[http://www.oppsdaily.com](http://www.oppsdaily.com)

and archive:

[https://www.oppslist.com](https://www.oppslist.com)

Plus here are a few:

1\. "I am a research assistant in a clinical science laboratory. Coordinating
and communicating with lab members and collaborators. It would be nice if
there were a secure way of sharing documents in unusual formats (like .pzf)
and messages in real-time and that they could be stored on a group
server/secure cloud that everyone could see and edit in concert with maybe a
admin managing editing and sharing permissions. It would have to be very
secure as the nature of the material shared would be extremely sensitive. An
embarrassingly large amount of money. Average lab software for a single user
license is $100-$500 USD for a year. If there were a group rate for under
$3,000 base, with a lesser yearly cost for security updates, that would be
worth it."

2\. "Being a long term unemployed person over 50 , I feel the biggest obstacle
to completing online applications is the constant re-keying my job history to
every single website I go to to apply for work. I feel an app or program that
a person will enter the data one time then populate that part of the online
application, from the app. This will help greatly and help reduce the
discouraging and redundant task of having to do this repeatedlly.

This should be free to the job seeker and maybe $100. or less to a company.
This would be a text file so not alot of graphics involved.

Thanks."

3\. "Project Manager in Healthcare. Project plan that could be shared with a
large audience. Turn a MS Project plan into an editable and readable format
for a large audience that doesn't have access to MS Project. Yes, $1,000 per
month."

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dsacco
Here's a few across different needs of mine and suitable for different
business models:

1) Give me a native Linux clone of Arq Backup, complete with deduplication and
client-side (E2E) encryption, with polished UI. I'm spoiled by Arq on Mac but
my daily driver is Linux and I have Duplicity, Duplicati, rclone, etc.

It needs to support AWS S3/Glacier, GCP Nearline/Coldline, Backblaze B2,
Google Drive, Dropbox and Box. Azure and OneDrive on the Microsoft would also
be nice. Text and email alerts (Twilio API or local SMTP server), granular
scheduling, frequent validation and dry run/budgeting features would be
awesome.

Probably a business model like Arq's - you buy a license for a major point
version instead of a SaaS subscription. I'm really looking for something that
takes minutes to set up with sane, fast and secure defaults.

2) Give me a piece of software that automates the process of finding product
recommendations online. For example, I really enjoy coffee. I frequently go to
a subreddit relevant to the hobby and search through it to get qualified
opinions. This is how I found my current bean grinder, French press, milk
steamer, electric kettle, etc. This would also work well for running, watches,
or other hobbies that include purchasing items.

I'm envisioning a website similar to Product Hunt or MassDrop, where users
sign up and select their interests (Coffee, Running, whatever). Then you have
an algorithm that uses the Reddit API to automatically map these user
interests to specific subreddits, then classify, rank and sort product
recommendations from the subreddit wiki and relevant threads. One step
further: for each product once it's sorted, use NLP to automatically classify
its most common positive and negative feedback. Then present this list to a
user to automate lists of product suggestions in tandem with crowdsourced user
reviews. Monetize the website with affiliate links, and eventually expand to
Twitter.

I'd use that! If I had the time I'd work on it myself :)

3) Mailing lists! I subscribe to a bunch of cryptography, security-announce,
tech newsletter and other mailing lists. Do for mailing lists what Slack did
to IRC. Develop a platform for centralizing mailing lists, such that I can
visit your website, sign up and subscribe to or unsubscribe from all of my
mailing lists in one unified interface.

On the server side, what you'll do is automatically subscribe to and crawl
every single mailing list you can find (mailing lists won't need to opt in),
then return each mailing list in the web application frontend with robust
caching and load balancing. Users can browse all mailing lists on the website
without logging in and search all of them historically. If they want them
delivered to email, they'll sign up and choose which ones they're interested
in to subscribe. The value add for users is one location for list discovery,
one feed for reading list subscriptions, one interface for searching across
all lists (with advanced features, naturally), and one pleasant interface for
unsubscribing from any mailing list with authentication that doesn't require
email confirmation.

Once you've got this down, start adding new features the way Slack did for
IRC. These features could add productivity to mailing list discussion; for
example: VCS issues, bug tracking or pull requests could be integrated to pop
up in a sidepane for threads. Then introduce a pricing structure. I suppose
the ultimate goal would be an acquisition by a company like Slack.

4) I have terabytes and terabytes of data that I need to efficiently find
insights in. All the tools exist for me to e.g. find correlations in
timeseries, but the management and setup process is slow. Devise a way for me
to rapidly test hypotheses in a framework designed specifically for this use
case. On the storage side, kdb is the gold standard but it's nose bleed
expensive. If you can develop a robust alternative, you can sell it for quite
a lot. On the analysis side, I need to automate the process of normalizing
data from disparate sources, across batch and stream processing, and load it
into a backtesting harness. I need to know quickly if there is a link between
seemingly unconnected data.

Ideally what I'd like is a way to store a massive amount of cleaned data from
different formats and sources, take a slice of each one for a specific period
and performantly run a correlation "fuzzer" that rapidly brute forces signals
in unrelated data.

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maxwin
Similar features (and stability ) in SAP with much much cheaper price.

