Ask HN: What is something that doesn't exist that you would pay for? - z0a
======
vonklaus
* A personalized search engine.

* portable software that is in a usb that stores your medical records. The problem is that all medical records are disaggregated and you have to bring them everywhere with you and the systems are incompatable. However, if you made a portable system agnostic applicaation using something like electron and sqllite that allowed your doctor (or any doctor) to run it when diagnosing or taking patient history, then he gives it back when completed that would be awesome. Could export files for doctors records. even files woul dbe upgrade on their end, as currently I had to fax over my records but also show up and bring them in person because that was unreliable(possibly because it is half centrury old tech). probably hipaa compliant as you would be responsible(but in control) of your data. would payoff big in 5 years whne personalized medicine is a thing. can't do it on mobile because it would be too vulnerable, must interface with anything with USB.

~~~
sunshiney
And how would this work if you are unconscious and found by a stranger? I'd
like a centralized database containing my medical info with a way for doctors
to immediately know relevant info and to be reminded off possible oversights.
I have had two family members suffer from doctor oversights and inability to
access information.

~~~
vonklaus
basically the same way. the system would still be balkanized and terrible, but
you would have a full searchable copy. it would basically be the equiv of
itunes. you bring it to all youdt docs and u put your records on it, then they
keep them to(like they do now) but you have a program that generates visual
correlations.

you could also use it to interface with healthkit and fitbit. all data one
place.

what if you were unconscious?

i imagine it in a bracelet with emergency contact with password. not 100%
sure. the medical system should have your files anyway, but it is hard to
balance privacy with a total stranger finding you in a state where you cant
communicate. not sure what they do now, presumably treat with as much info as
they could get from the person.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Why does privacy matter? What is it protecting against? Medical record privacy
has caused millions if not billions in lost productivity. People are probably
dying because of this. Coming from a country that has centralized digital
access to medical records (Taiwan), the US obsession with medical record
privacy seems insane.

~~~
sunshiney
After living a long time and experiencing the medical issues with family that
I have experienced. .. I agree with you. The privacy fear is actually related
to employmemt.. a fear employers will not hire you if you have medical issues.

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galistoca
A service that tells you something that doesn't exist that people will pay
for.

~~~
kinkdr
You mean HN?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789869)

~~~
_RPM
This is kind of like recursion

~~~
075
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11790158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11790158)

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id122015
I'd pay/crowdfund a Linux Desktop Environment that is as good as OSX one. Some
features I'd beparticularly interested are to easier customise the trackpad,
drag n drop, anything that makes a good user interface. Not bells and
whistles.

~~~
reitanqild
IMO elementary is pretty close without being an outright copy.

Personally I would even say I prefer its differences (except single-click-to-
open) to Mac.

Edit: yes, I think I already sent some money in their direction.

~~~
curiousgal
I haven't heard of it either. Is it stable?

~~~
reitanqild
I'd say so. I've only used it for 2 years or so though ;-)

More seriously: I do install and uninstall a number of different applications
frlm time to time and I guess the (minor) snags I have seen results mostly
from that.

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Jemaclus
\- Hearing aids that run off body heat (changing batteries every couple of
days is a bitch)

\- Some sort of system that lets me watch movies and TV shows with
captions/subtitles without forcing everyone around me to see them. (The little
devices at movie theaters are neat, but clunky and don't work at home.) I'm
imagining augmented-reality glasses, but I would take some sort of polarized
glasses that only make subtitles visible to me.

\- A reliable way for a minimally trained person (note: not _untrained_ ) to
draw blood for blood tests and drop them in the mail without having to go to a
lab.

~~~
toast0
Polarized glasses, plus an LCD display with the front polarizer removed =
display just for you, if there's a good way to route captions to a secondary
display?

(getting an appropriate size and shape display to mount under or over the main
display is also a challenge)

Edit: An article about removing the front polarizer
[http://www.gizmag.com/stealth-computer-display-lcd-
polarizin...](http://www.gizmag.com/stealth-computer-display-lcd-polarizing-
glasses/29700/) although I had forgotten that you'll end up with an all white
screen for people without polarized glasses, that might be distracting too...

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erac1e
Courses aimed at getting me into specialized job roles. E.g. a course aimed at
getting a job as a Financial Trading .NET developer. It would probably be an
amalgamation of courses on .NET that are used in finances plus courses that
teach financial markets etc.

Similarly: professional certifications that mean something. I.e. a
certification for .NET that shows I really know my stuff but just something I
memorized like the MCP style exams (that's how I remember them being 10 years
ago).

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Udacity?

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reitanqild
A customizable single-site-browser with a few extra features like a quake-like
slide-in etc.

I'd use it in combination with sandstorm and try to create some of the stuff I
miss all the time.

I think electron is pretty close only it us focused on running client-side
code on top of node js while I want to run sandstorm or generic web apps
running on the www, or a company web server or even on the same machine even.

(Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about electron)

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cdvonstinkpot
A customizable in-shoe arch support which form-fits to the exact shape/needs
of each foot.

Years ago there used to be such a product from SuperFeet, which you would heat
up then form to the foot & would hold its shape upon cooling. But apparently
it's no longer available.

------
breakyerself
A robot that sorts and folds laundry.

~~~
angelofm
Yes please I would pay for that, great idea

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jasonkester
This:

[http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-
machine](http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine)

Barring that, even a little 2x3 set of home/end/pgup/pgdn/delete keys with an
adhesive backing and Bluetooth connection that I could stick over the power
button on a MacBook Pro to quadruple my productivity.

Even a year in, I feel like I navigate code at less than half speed trying to
use the 2-3 key, 2 hand chords that those basic keys require on a Mac
keyboard.

Let me jump to the end of a document without setting down my coffee and you
can have as much of my money as you like.

~~~
afarrell
You can buy an external Lenovo keyboard
[https://jet.com/product/detail/46d2f67ba52346b79674d4b60358c...](https://jet.com/product/detail/46d2f67ba52346b79674d4b60358cab4)

~~~
jasonkester
Sadly, that's the new layout chicklet keyboard, with the messed up home/end
block. It wouldn't actually address the issue.

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lgieron
I'd pay for a pension fund - which takes my money and, when I retire, uses it
pay out fixed income pension every month, based on my life expectancy.

~~~
kspaans
Vanguard has a product similar to what you're looking for: Target Retirement
Funds. [https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-
retirement...](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-
retirement/#/)

It does everything you want _up to_ retirement age, but after that I believe
you're on your own to pay yourself out of the fund.

Of course, that assumes you can accurately predict when you'll retire. :) And
it depends on what you mean by "fixed income". Do you mean a specific monthly
amount agreed on _right now_ (see also: defined benefit plan), or a specific
monthly amount that's set once you retire and doesn't change until you die
(see also: annuity). The hardest part about all of this, IMO, is predicting
how much money you'll need in retirement (a function of both life expectancy
and desired quality of life during retirement) and thus predicting how much
money you need to put away every month starting now.

EDIT: Disclaimer: I own some Vanguard funds (but not Target Retirement ones).

~~~
lgieron
> that I believe you're on your own to pay yourself out of the fund.

I am specifically interested in that part :) If I'm withdrawing the money
myself from the fund, then I have to take into account the small possibility
of me living until I'm 90-100, and thus split money into portions that will
last that long.

A company could pool a lot of people's money and take advantage of the law of
big numbers (i.e. the average lifspan of their clients can be predicted with
actuarial math) and portion my money as if I'm going to die when the stats
predict me to die (sooner than 90-100 years old), making my monthly
withdrawals bigger. That's what state pension funds do in a lot of countries
at the moment, incl. my country Poland, but I don't trust the government with
my money.

~~~
kspaans
Ahh OK, so you want something pretty close to an annuity then. I wonder if
Wealthfront or Betterment or something would have a plan that helps you invest
while you work and then buys an annuity for you when you retire...

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max_
I need Ethereum block chain as a service since i donot want to run a full
node. (Azure has this but has this vendor lock in i donot tolerate)

Also an easy programmatic way to work with the Ethereum transactions. like the
Coinbase api for BTC ^1. [1]
[https://developers.coinbase.com/](https://developers.coinbase.com/)

------
mrmondo
\- Something that irons shirts properly for me.

\- An open source, robust, easy-as-Dropbox to use distributed file system that
performs well and provides a decent level of security and version control.

\- An open source web browser that doesn't suck (not sure that's possible
while JavaScript still exists?).

\- A self-upgradable eGPU for your macs that accelerates the inbuilt display
for gaming.

\- A high quality bill splitting & IOU app for iOS that you can take a photo
of a receipt then divide up who had what and who paid, others can access the
bill and agree / disagree and pay their part.

\- A better replacement for WINE that makes running Windows games faster and
more reliable on OSX.

\- A joystick similar to the thrust master in its simple but low profile
design that is useful for space sims like elite dangerous (I've tried the top
end Saitek and hate it).

\- A service that replaces 'on motherboard' ram like that found in the latest
Retina Macbook with larger sized memory chips.

\- An efficient, smart and small 240V bedroom heater.

\- Service / plugin that circumvents country blocks such as those found on
Netflix and YouTube that A) doesn't route all your traffic through it (VPN)
and B) doesn't make you use custom DNS servers.

\- Hosted Plex media centre with large amounts of online storage and low
latency to Australian customers.

\- A better, open source Jabber / XMPP chat client for Windows (I don't use
Windows's but I hate seeing people run pidgin!).

\- Some sort of completely legal, non addictive, non harmful high or low mood
creator pill / medical thing. I.e. Want to be amped up and cheerful for a
party but don't want to damage yourself to get physically addicted to a 'bad'
substance - there's a pill/patch/mouth spray for that. Likewise, something
that's not physically addictive or harmful but helps you chill out relax and
laugh after a day of work without taking addictive drugs like benzos or
smoking anything. I guess I'd like to see more products like Armodafinil.

A service where you can upload photos of shoes that you like / own and will
return you recommendations and links to purchase other shoes you may like.
Sounds weird I know but there's a lot of crappy shoes out there and when you
have a few pairs you really like its often hard to find anything similar.

A better interface to Terraform to allow vendor-agnostic management of VM
deployment across many 'cloud' and locally hosted platforms, must be open
source, support XenServer, KVM/Libvirt and AWS.

A service that gives incentives to game designers to make their software cross
platform.

A modern CMS that isn't based off PHP or JavaScript, is open source, very easy
to manage and lightweight to host yet scales well.

An open source competitor to the Kindle with a premium screen etc....

A high resolution, affordable e-ink screen that can be used for reading long
articles etc and perhaps clips onto the side of your MacBook or iMac.

An open source, privacy first, distributed social network and communications
platform that doesn't suck and appeals to the masses.

A high end wireless AC (at least 1300) mini-pcie network card that is
compatible / comes with good quality drivers for PFSense (FreeBSD) with at
least 4 aerials to turn your router into a wireless AP.

A modern, high quality, low latency, high throughput switching platform (like
Juniper's EX4500 range) that runs an open source OS and manages all
configuration in git version controlled eYAML or similar.

A platform like NewRelic and Datadog that is self hosted, high performance and
adorable.

A high quality, lightweight web app that you can self-host to stream your
music from your Linux file server that isn't all javascripty and heavy,
doesn't use Java or PHP - essentially groovebasin without all the hard to get
and install dependencies that's self contained and runs nicely across various
distros.

More space-western SciFi TV series.

A harmonica that's digital - silent to practise on for everyone around you but
you can plug in headphones / your computer and hear yourself play - must feel
and act like a real harmonica (support bending notes etc...)

An affordable service that will convert an ebook file to an audiobook.

~~~
bbcbasic
For the heater, if you own rather than rent your home then consider buying air
con!

a spilt system air con with reverse cycle (so it acts as a heat pump) is super
efficient (more than 100%) and takes up no floor space. Also by convective
heating it feels warmer faster than radiation.

~~~
mrmondo
Thank you for your thoughtfulness and suggestion, I personally rent and have
aircon. But I speak more generally - I believe we can do better, more
localised heating.

------
reitanqild
id122015 mentions something like Mac.

I'd rather prefer something along the lines of Mint Mate or Cinnamon, coupled
with elementarys funding model. I sometimes send money those directions but
once real MS Office gets available on something like this I would test it for
work at next opportunity.

Also next time I work at a place that only demands a working IDE I'll go for a
Linux desktop. (Last time I had that opportunity I went with Mac and my two
last jobs has demanded an MS environment).

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dave2000
A4 sized Kindle (not an old, second hand one)

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erac1e
Oh... and a reliable builder.

