

Ask HN: What can I build for you today? - AlexMuir

What's your biggest pain point?<p>I want to build a webapp that people and/or businesses will find useful.  I'll start building it right now.<p>One webapp per comment will make it easy for people to vote.
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megamark16
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, you're asking the wrong people. This is a
community of builders, you need to ask the users (or potential users). Go
interview small business owners in your area. Call up companies and ask to
talk to the office manager. Let them know that you're interested in building
something that will solve a problem of theirs so that you can sell it to other
small businesses, but that you're not trying to sell them something, you just
need their help in identifying painful problems that nobody else is solving.

~~~
AlexMuir
People here understand what's possible. They are aware when something is sub-
optimal. If I go and ask the majority of people on the street they won't even
know they have a problem.

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RiderOfGiraffes
A way of reading HN that lets me say "That was interesting" and "That is of no
interest to me" and then presents, when asked, all the posts from the last 48
hours based on how interesting a Bayesian (or other) filter thinks I'll find
them.

I've been intending to write my own, but I've been too busy of late to make
any progress.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Huh. I've been having the same idea. Except it doesn't have to be limited to
HN. I was thinking more along the lines of a standalone system that you can
give RSS feeds or whatever (a way to fetch new articles, in any case). You
train it like a spam filter, except you mark articles are interesting or
uninteresting. It goes out, gets more articles, presents the ones with the
best scores, you train it further, etc.

I've been kicking this idea around for a while, but like you, I haven't
actually started, mostly because I'm not sure about the best way to do it.
(E.g. web app, traditional desktop app, etc. Not to mention the implementation
language...)

~~~
sigil
Check out newsblur.com. The code is on github (all python and js).

~~~
zephyrfalcon
That looks almost like what I had in mind... except you have to tell it what
you like and don't like about an article (limited to author, title,
publisher). What I had in mind was, feed the text of the article to a bayesian
filter, and let the system make decisions based on that.

At first sight, telling newsblur that you like an author or publisher, doesn't
seem to useful... you might as well subscribe to their feed in a regular RSS
reader then. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.

~~~
samd
I thought your idea was great and then I tried out NewsBlur and came to the
same conclusion you did. It seems to be filtering based on title, author,
publisher, and tag rather than doing any statistical filtering of the text.
That's not very useful because I already know who produces great content
consistently and I subscribe to their feeds. What I need is a way to filter
out the good articles from inconsistent sources.

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vgurgov
Pay-per-answer email service. I want to create email address- smthg like
@payperanswer.com

I can give it to recruiters, and all ppl that want something from me. Senders
need to credit say $1 to sent me something to that inbox and once i reply to
that email money go to charity of my choose (and 50% go to payperanswer.com or
something).

I wanted to build something like that myself, but dont have time atm.

Extra bonus - convince Steve Jobs to use, price it like $1000 to Apache SW
Foundation, and publish all emails publically - what would be HUGE!!! :))))

~~~
notyourwork
I would be interesting in being a part of this project! Contact me if you want
to take this from inception to conception!!! Email is on my profile.

~~~
vgurgov
sorry i didnt get it.. why do you need my contact? feel free to implement this
thing, i don't hold any patents for this AMAZING idea :)

I rely on your sense of justice and just added red Ferrary to my amazon
wishlist

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niyazpk
I need a book listing service similar to <http://www.7bks.com>, but which
shows ratings (by me) and category. The list should be embeddable in my
website. (eg: <http://sivers.org/book> )

(The service could then extract the user ratings and make a top books list for
each category.)

~~~
topcat31
Hey, I'm the creator of 7books :)

Embeddable lists are definitely on my roadmap. Drop me an email (tom@) and let
me know exactly what you want and I'll see if I can build it for you!

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nodata
It seems we need a better way of tracking what existing webapps are available.

~~~
AlexMuir
Great idea. Sort of like an Appstore for webapps (without payments).
<http://www.appappeal.com/> was the first thing I came across - it looks
awful. Anyone used it?

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maxklein
Write a small PHP plugin that will allow our users invite their friends. This
plug-in can be embedded as an iframe, and then it will ask the user to select
his email service. Options would be gmail, yahoo and any other email services
that provide an API. On clicking next, he will authenticate, and then his
contacts will be displayed, with none selected. He can select as many as he
wants. Pressing next once more will allow him customize the invite email, and
a final 'invite' press will invite all his friends.

I believe most of us here could use this.

~~~
bobds
You can use OpenInviter: <http://openinviter.com/>

I think you have to signup to download it, but it's free and you get the
source.

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corin_
A sexy dashboard that grabs data from Google Analytics API and displays it all
- suitible to have a monitor up on the wall showing various stats from 1-10
websites, highly customisable, very beautiful.

~~~
lachyg
Heard of <http://geckoboard.com/> ?

~~~
corin_
I now have, and will check it out on Monday - thanks!

edit: don't suppose you have an invite code?

~~~
pmjoyce
Hi guys, I'm the founder of Geckoboard. Thanks for your interest (and thanks
for the mention lachyg).

We currently have a a backlog of > 1000 invites. It's still early days and the
product is a little raw but if you're interested in checking it out mail me
(address in my profile). If you include your HN handle I'll get your invite
out straight away.

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bearwithclaws
The webapp that shows exactly what you're looking for in this "Ask HN" post.

I've created Wappr.com. Too much hassle to moderate/filter (100% neglected
right now). I hope you have a much better solution.

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someone_here
I would like a shared to-do list that is suitable for touchscreen devices.

~~~
DannyCooper
Building it - <http://gettasklist.com>

~~~
someone_here
Cool!

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nodata
Please, please make an application that will make it easy to track supporting
and opposing views on a topic. The idea being to replace discussions (mailing
list, real life meetings) that get lost in word games and politics. The
application would bring transparency to a decision and allow any people not
acquainted with the discussion to get up to speed quickly. An evidence-based
transparent decision process I guess.

~~~
AlexMuir
<http://www.procon.org/> does this, but for more popular topics.

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swombat
A plugin/gem for rails apps that allows you to build a feedburner-like feed
subscriber tracking system so you don't have to go through FB all the time. If
all it does is accurately report the number of subscribers, I'll be using it
on a number of sites. If it does more, all the better.

Feedburner in a gem, basically.

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malbiniak
A tool similar to Delicious that aggregates content that you've Liked on
Facebook (within the wall) and marked as a Favorite on Twitter. There's a few
of us that are using those two methods to mark content to come back and read
later.

~~~
StavrosK
Not exactly, but <http://historio.us/> is similar.

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bezdekt
A sync tool between Mac Outlook 2011 and Google Calendar and Contacts

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fezzl
A web app manager. The browser window is far from optimal for using multiple
web apps at once.

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desigooner
Upvote a post on HN if I click on the post in the New section.

