Ask HN: Name one product/service that you personally need but doesn't yet exist - danielhughes
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makebelieve
A money manager. It knows all the expenses and allocates an allowance. it
tells you to get a new job and to trim expenses in a sensible way. it tells
you to stop buying so many clothes/books/whatever. it asks you to repeat what
you are doing when you don't spend money. it makes you justify expenses before
you can have money. it saves for you.

I think this is possible now, when it was impossible before. it funds a debit
card monthly for you, and calculates everything else. it learns you finances
and then plans accordingly. most people will adapt to whatever money they
have, they just suck at managing it. there isn't anyone that tells you "you
can't afford that." or "you will run out of money if your lunches are so
expensive" "your rent is too much money, get a better job" "you are not saving
enough, what can you change so I can save you more money?" that would make
life SO much easier.

~~~
herbst
I like the idea but doubt that would work out, at least not in my environment.
I think this can only work if you use your credit card everywhere and always,
else you would have to write down your expenses yourself and we know nobody
would do that.

Then a lot of payments show up as rather generic. You would need to map a lot
of "Payment Messages" to a topic, again something i think i would not do.

I think i could see that working rather in a Bitcoin only environment than
anywhere else.

But then again, there apparently are americans who use their credit cards all
the time and for everything. This might be just a american thing i cant
understand.

~~~
mbrock
There are Europeans who use credit or debit cards for everything, too. There
are also several budget managers based on that being the case.

Tink is a Swedish one that I've used and it works well. It uses some Bayesian
classifier or whatever to map payment codes to specific vendors, and to assign
categories to vendors. When you login, it might say "we're uncertain about
these 7 transactions, please classify them." In exchange for this very small
amount of work, you get pie charts and trends and whatnot to visualize your
spending habits.

When I first tried it years ago I immediately started baking my own bread and
making my own hummus every day to cut down on lunch spending.

There are many consumer vendors in Sweden that don't even accept cash. Most
bank offices don't handle any cash whatsoever.

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mbrock
A todo list that helps me figure out WTF to do, maybe by generating checklists
from a corpus of facts, sources trusted via web of trust, social
collaboration, etc.

I'd input "trip to Thailand" and the service would break that down into:

1 check your vaccines

1.1 hepatitis A most important

1.2 try local clinic X, click here to dial

2 check your insurance

2.1 click here if you have home insurance

2.2 click here to purchase trip-specific travel insurance

3 decide dates

3.1 week? two weeks? month? click to specify

3.2 pick a flight, click to browse curated list

And so on. (These should probably be in reverse order but I'm too lazy to
change the numbers.)

~~~
kleer001
I'm there too. A crowd sourced and trained machine learning travel agent would
be phenomenal. Quite expensive too.

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ttepasse
Real life Undo

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kleer001
A smart meta-OS, a computer butler a la Jarvis. I want a ultra-light weight
daemon that sits on my network and learns what I use, when and where. Then,
after getting a fair amount of data it starts to subtly suggest my next step.

Say, I use Itunes every morning at 6 am for my morning run, except on Sundays
or holidays. My Jarvis would see that I'm up and going outside and it's a
Tuesday and get my regular playlist ready as a little icon on an unobtrusive
toolbar. Or whatever it finds and figures out. Sure it would be a little
clunky at first, but people tend to be regular and predictable. Also, people
tend to externalize their bodily functions, fire is an external step of
digestion and clothing is an external form of fur.

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imakesnowflakes
A machine that detects the toxins/harmful chemicals in food materials....

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insoluble
A way to sort or filter Web searches (sites, articles, posts, comments) by the
IQ and or age of the person who wrote it. This would help people to minimise
low-quality content. Even if the person were unknown, heuristic methods could
be devised to estimate the level of intellect in a given article or post.
There are various obstacles and abuses to be resolved, but it would still be
nice to have a feature like this available. At the same time, I imagine that
society would not currently accept such a proposition.

~~~
dalerus
I would take a system that told me the reading level of the article before I
click through.

~~~
insoluble
It's surprising the big search engines don't already do something this simple.
Maybe a browser plugin could perform this analysis on blocks of text and
append a small div at the upper right/left showing the score for each block.
Perhaps it could even use things like misspellings and grammar errors as
indicators of poor quality control.

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Gustomaximus
A personal life assistant at a good price.

Is it realistic to get something like a 20hrs/mth retainer for like $10/hr to
sort out things for me. Something that was a longer term relationship so they
get to know your personality plus build trust ideally.

Possibly share this assistant with friends/family.

The role would be to create a 1) one stop shop that 2) gets to know you and 3)
can remove small distraction tasks; like coordinate dinner with friends,
monitor my emails to pay bills, find good tyres for my car, come up with gift
ideas, find me a new cleaner etc.

~~~
buzzdenver
> for like $10/hr

Hey, big spender !

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tiredwired
Telomere lengthener thingy.

~~~
insoluble
I've been waiting for this too. It would be better if somehow only the best
performers received this update. The problem is determining which performers
are doing their jobs _correctly_.

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arikia
A functional news media.

~~~
hanniabu
Can you expand on your definition of functional?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
One that tells you the truth, not just "things that are true"?

For example, don't just tell us he said, and she said, and leave us to try to
figure it out. Investigate until you know who's right, and why, _and tell us_.

~~~
herbst
I would rather prefer the exact opposite. News that tell me the facts and then
let me figure out my opinion without mentioning theirs all the time.

~~~
michael_fine
I really wouldn't -- there are orders of magnitude more facts in the world
than I have time to digest, so it certainly helps having a basis of analysis,
even if sometimes that analysis is misguided.

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AwesomeFaic
I have a habit of jumping into a new hobby/collection every 6-12 months but
never know where to start since most online resources cater towards those who
already know what they're doing (specifically watches in my case). I started a
website hoping to address that, but it's far from finished. If there are any
sites that do this already I'd love to see them!

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codegeek
I got a few:

\- Teleportation

\- Time Machine

\- Dream Recorder (as in record our dreams as we see them)

\- Mind Reader (as in Mel Gibson in What Women Want :))

~~~
atmosx
> Mind Reader

This is a really, really bad idea.

~~~
imakesnowflakes
Holy shit! You just read my mind!

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DrScump
Teleportation.

~~~
NameNickHN
Coupled with a time machine.

~~~
jneumann004
Coupled with something that is common now, but won't be in a decade.

~~~
DrScump
Oh, and I want a pony, too.

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hemling
Knowledge uploading like in the Matrix movie

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sourcedelica
A way to get around Twitter's 800 tweet home timeline limit. Or maybe this
exists already? That would be great.

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Toenex
switch-for-me. I don't care who my household energy supplier is, I just want
to pay the least each month without the hassle of monitoring my usage,
comparing prices and administrating the transfer. You do it for me and you can
keep a percentage of the saving.

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tmaly
an easy way to update your address when you move without having to make 500
phone calls

~~~
stevekemp
Move to Finland.

They have a population database which is queried by companies, such that if
you move house your details are updated once, and instantly visible to
companies.

It's both a little disturbing, and highly useful.

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i2ifunding
Time control Machine

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rtl49
Sorry, I don't think you'll find any free lunch here.

The products I would like to see don't exist because they're not economically
viable (e.g. high-quality development and mobile phone hardware using open
source firmware) or they depend on technology that doesn't yet exist or
doesn't scale well, etc.

You may come up with a novel idea for a viable product, but no one can do this
for you.

