
Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? - prmph
Looking to build something really productive and useful as I invest time into learning additional technologies.<p>My skills are available to HN members. I&#x27;m able and willing to build pretty much anything along the lines of B2C or B2B tools (therefore excluding compilers, database engines, or operating system, and the like).<p>What do wish someone would build for you? The emphasis is on something that solves a practical problem for you, not just interesting.<p>I will select a wish that appeals to me, and give free invites to HN members when it is done.
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akg_67
See if you can solve this problem with software. The article and comments
pretty well articulate the problem.

Weeding the Worst Library Books
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586061)

A combination of data from Amazon and Google Books along with library checkout
and interlibrary loan requests might be able to lead you to figure out what
books to store at what library location in a city, what books to dispose, and
what type of books patrons of a specific library prefer.

~~~
prmph
Interesting; I see this as a special case of a more general problem that I
might take on. I have ideas about an organizational decision making tool that
aggregates input from stakeholders and web APIs in an intelligent and
transparent way to rank options

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ThatGeoGuy
A robust, fast (think BLAS / LAPACK) matrix library a la Numpy or Eigen,
except for Scheme. Something like an R7RS library would be great, however if
it only worked on one of Gambit / Gauche / CHICKEN / Guile that would be fine
too.

One of the biggest problems seems to be coming up with an efficient / sane way
of slicing or passing matrices without requiring explicit copies. It would
also need to eventually support sparse matrix operations, as well as complex
numbers.

To be honest, recreating something similar to Numpy / Eigen in any language
would be a pretty big feat. I've toyed with the idea of wrapping Eigen into
CHICKEN Scheme before, however incorporating C++ classes into Scheme can be
confusing and cause some serious headaches.

As for why I want this -> I want to be able to do really fast matrix
operations with the elegance of Scheme as a language. Outside of fast and easy
linear algebra, I've wanted for nothing whenever I've used Scheme.

------
api
A video chat app for desktop and mobile that is simple, minimal, just works,
and works well even under low bandwidth conditions.

All the existing solutions I can find are feature-encrusted junk where the
core video chat functionality is just awful. If anything, video conferencing
apps have _declined_ noticeably in quality in recent years.

~~~
plant42
I recommend Appear.in [http://appear.in](http://appear.in)

~~~
mpatobin
I second appear.in

Several times now I've been in a group chat where someone's audio or video
isn't working so we go to appear.in and everything works perfectly

~~~
GFischer
I'm writing what could potentially be a competitor to appear.in and I also
recommend them :P .

They're definitely the cream of the WebRTC crop right now.

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cweiss
An ID/Medical/Etc card scanning/viewing mobile app. Something that will nicely
scan my wallet cards and allow me to easily bring the scans up and (if needed)
email/print/photocopy the images of them on demand.

Bonus points for:

\- Search capabilities (requires OCR, or at least manual tagging)

\- Geolocation (if I'm at a doctor's office, bring my medical card to the
front).

\- Security - Encrypt the images in memory and require a PIN to unlock.

\- Bright mode for barcode scanning/photocopying (which overlaps with other
apps like Passbook, Wallet, etc, but they don't support non-shopping cards).

~~~
sdmcelroy
you can use google drive to do this. Click the new document button in the app
and select "scan".

------
jackgavigan
A decent 'To Do' list:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355029)

~~~
prmph
This is really interesting. I'm particularly struck by this item: "order in a
way that takes urgency, importance and deadlines into account"

Do you envisage being able to configure this ordering (for example by
weighting the various factors)?

~~~
mbrock
Personally, my mental to-do model consists to a pretty large part of recurring
tasks with more or less vague "deadlines."

For example, at home, taking out trash, watering plants, stocking up on
groceries, paying the rent, etc.

However, almost all to-do systems seem to be aimed at scheduling one-off
tasks.

So I would like the to-do system to more accurately model my real to-do model,
which would probably mean having a special item type for these circular,
Sisyphean tasks.

~~~
SyneRyder
I use Toodledo [1] for this, especially for the recurring tasks. There are
even different ways to define how it recurs, eg taking out the trash might be
every Wednesday, but watering plants might be "2 days after I last completed
it". When you complete the task, it automatically enters the next recurring
task for you (and hides it from you until the appropriate day).

[1] [http://www.toodledo.com](http://www.toodledo.com)

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Nadya
Beets [0] for arbitrary files with available tags/metadata defined through
config on a per-filetype basis.

Being able to organize and query _all_ of my files on the same level I can my
music would be _amazing_.

[0]
[http://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html](http://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)

~~~
tedmiston
I've forgotten what it's like to having file-level access to my music at this
point...

I suppose it could be made to work with an API too.

~~~
prmph
Can you elaborate on this a bit more?

~~~
tedmiston
Over the past few years, I have mostly used streaming services (Spotify, Apple
Music, Beats) which have DRM on their local caches to prevent accessing the
files directly.

~~~
prmph
I was actually referring to the API bit of your comment.

I suspect providing this functionality just on Linux-y systems might not be
very useful. If there is a way to make it web-based but still work with local
files on each platform, that might be more useful.

------
tedmiston
Motivation to spend more free time doing two things - going to the gym and
solving programming challenges.

~~~
vishalzone2002
more like motivation stuff based on what you want to do

------
afarrell
I would want a better cli or curses debugger for javascript. One that does not
involve connecting to chrome over a port.

Also, if you're interested remote-pair-programming on whatever you're
building, please let me know.

~~~
prmph
I will likely take you on your offer. Stay tuned.

