HN, what's bothering you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858112

by freshfey • 14 years ago

22 34 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We're a community of builders. But we are also busy individuals with lots of problems (that need a simple or complex solution).

So HN, what's bothering you? What do you want to get solved for you? For what product/service would you pay if it existed today?

temp8675309• 14 years ago

My mother in law just lost her job as a school librarian at the same time as my father in law is getting dicked around by workman's comp for an on-the-job injury. They need financial help but are too proud to take it - they don't like the thought of their son in law bailing them out even though I make far more than they do. This bothers me.

wwwtyro• 14 years ago

Is it feasible to pay their debts/bills anonymously? I am also curious about this, for similar reasons.

freshfey• 14 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that. What about taking care of "smaller" bills, like grocery etc. Make a list of what they need and just buy it (without asking them). Brush it off as "you were buying groceries anyway".

tstegart2• 14 years ago

Maybe your wife can approach them instead of you?

r00fus• 14 years ago

There are several options here - their pride and wariness are probably natural human responses.

1) Pose the financial assistance as a loan or other arrangement that has reasonable terms.

2) Claim you're investing money with them or trust them (if they are savvy) to invest it for you. My sister did this for my parents a while back - she claimed that she was giving money for my father to invest, and I'm sure she's never expecting the money back.

There are numerous ways in which you can "ask them to help you" while in reality you are helping them. This can also bring you closer, but it requires a good deal of time and energy to set up (not to mention the money).

Keep in mind, this kind of arrangement is fraught with downsides too - there is a reason most folks recommend against loaning to, or going in business with your family.

voxx• 14 years ago

I'm dying one second at a time and I'm in the way of all of my personal aspirations and the only way out is to blindly hope for salvation.

AND MY COFFEE MUG BROKE

damoncali• 14 years ago

My real estate broker is a pain in the ass.

geoffschmidt2• 14 years ago

I'm drowning in email. It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with. Gmail's priority inbox thing is useless for me. If you solved this problem, actually solved it, I'd pay whatever you asked. $25, $50, $100/month? A bargain.

brudgers• 14 years ago

My gut tells me that smart email isn't a web-based solution - it's a local one. What matters is knowing about how you work, and the information to do that isn't on the web, it's on your hard drive.

Web processes cannot afford to work on optimizing results for you in the background, they are focused on getting your answer quick and then moving on to the next customer. On the other hand, right now I've probably got 98% idle CPU on the 8 cores of this machine which could be figuring out when and how to deal with my email by looking at the terabytes of local data I've collected over the past few years.

It's a shrink wrapped product, not a service. Given how well Google and Facebook can serve individually targeted ads over the web based on a handful of CPU cycles, odds are that a dedicated local service could handle email if utilizing idle CPU cycles.

rkwz• 14 years ago

Just curious, what kind of emails do you get?

> It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with.

Does it mean that you get way more unimportant emails than important ones? Can't you just filter them away to tags/trash?

tstegart2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I second this. I don't get many emails because I've taken myself off the all lists. Can't the OP do the same? No twitter notifications, no FB notifications, remove yourself from all RSS feeds that you never look at, all mailing lists. Maybe its not email's problem but a problem with your organization abilities.

geoffschmidt2• 14 years ago

I guess the problem is that there are a lot of things that are "somewhat" important, and I can't do them all, so I have to triage even between the "important" items. A friend of a friend is having a housewarming party? Cool, I normally want to know, and maybe put it on my calendar. But when I get behind on my mail I don't even want to see that stuff on my screen.

And a lot of the unimportant stuff I want to at least glance at, if I have a spare minute.

aorshan• 14 years ago

I feel like I'm wasting my time in my college classes. I love being at college and would never give it up, but classes don't challenge me and aren't interesting.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

Oh, you know what's bothering me?

Whenever others submit "Show HN" stories they get upvoted to the front page and I give them feedback, sometimes spending 30 minutes on helping them fix some of their design problems. But when I submit my "Show HN" site, which I've tried 3 times now, it never makes it anywhere and I don't get feedback. So I give and I don't get anything back.

I put in more than I get out. When this happens I leave the community permanently and never look back. I'm thinking of leaving HN. This will be the 4th time I'm leaving a community because I'm putting in more than what I'm getting out of it. HN has turned into TechCrunch, a place for nothing but tech news so wanna be entrepreneurs that don't do anything but dick around on the internet can read about other people's tech success and live in someone else's glory.

How the hell does the "Facebook Acquires Instagram" story help any of us? How has that information enriched your life or helped you create something? We're suppose to be a community that helps each other out, because startups and websites are hard, and occasionally talk about some tech news. Now it's just tech news 24/7.

I've got a few more Show HN submitions, if those don't go anywhere I'm out.

Edit: Here's what I wanted to show. Thanks for your guy's support. http://www.timeforzen.com

helen8420003• 14 years ago

Hey Chris,

What are the links? I'll be happy to give feedback.Shoot me a mail if you like!

dclaysmith2• 14 years ago

Here's one... give it an upvote... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858109

par• 14 years ago

Agreed. I have submitted some Show HN's and they never get upvoted. I see other Show HN's that are just crummy landing pages. I don't get it. I spend a lot of time working on my projects and try to make something at least some people find useful. It's at least more useful than a landing page. But nope.

helen8420003• 14 years ago

Also I think sometimes it depends quite a lot on how you word your post.

It's quite tempting to think - "I spent a lot of time on this, it speaks for itself" where as you need to pique the interest of the crowd.

Even go as so far to give a run down of how and why you built it and what you learned! We're suckers for a great backstory and a few data points.

dclaysmith2• 14 years ago

I think getting on the frontpage (and getting good feedback) takes a bit of luck. Time of the day/etc. Try and get your submission in /newest before the East Coast gets to work... then you'll be on there for an hour+ and people will have a chance to see and upvote your submission. Try pinging #startups @ irc.freenode.net and let people know you are showing off something you've been working on. I find people who hang out there are usually pretty helpful and might give you an upvote.

It takes a lot for me NOT to upvote a "Show HN" post. If it's a genuine/not spammy I'll upvote it even if I'm not interested it the project itself just so it will get seen by people who are.

I'll be glad to take a look at any of your projects. Post links here or email me.

atldev• 14 years ago

Just looked at your timeforzen project and think it's great. Sorry it didn't get as much attention as you'd like, but one thing that HN can help you learn is how to pitch. You'll run into the same issues in the market, only it's more difficult to get traction and it brings heavier implications (not growing revenue). Use HN as a lab to learn ways to get attention. Figure out which hooks work best.

Meanwhile, I'd be disappointed if HN didn't provide good discussion/insight on the FB acquisition. This is the only community where I could tolerate the discussion. Elsewhere it's just soundbites repeated from news clips. Most often, I click the comments link before the story link. That's why I like HN and won't be going anywhere.

korussian• 14 years ago

I checked out timeforzen.com. I don't want to unblock flash so that audio can play. The message suggesting I do that sounds a bit snarky too.

no_news_is• 14 years ago

I also got the very un-Zen-like message about Flash being needed. The page blanked out after that and I'm not sure why. Next load was fine and I had no problems playing audio -- did not change any configuration. Flash is enabled, by the way.

After this I was a little hesitant to click on a link that read "enable-javascript.com", thinking it was another mistake. You should replace those links via JavaScript if it is enabled to avoid misleading your visitors. I did click though, and as I said, playback functioned fine.

The pictures are beautiful and well-presented. The names are evocative and well-matched to the pictures. Well done on the design. Good idea, have some doubts about conversion rate but that's your deal to figure out.

Not everything needs to be with DOM windows - I wouldn't mind clicking though to another page to see the "About."

AznHisoka2• 14 years ago

Today? Allergies.

Overall? I hate crowded subways. Why so many useless people who exist?

dholowiski• 14 years ago

PG said it - Email/Todo's I need a really kick ass web based todo manager and I need it to work like email (so I can exchange todo's with other people). I started building one but... not enough time, too much todo.

yolesaber• 14 years ago

Have you looked at Asana? http://asana.com/

4342rr• 14 years ago

Honestly, I'm lonely as hell lately. I'm starting to question how it's possible I don't have a nice ladyfriend by now. It's really starting to crush me. I even considered posting this as an ASK HN since I think this place has some of the smartest comments I've ever read, so I thought surely someone could help, but then I thought "well it's not exactly hacker-related, maybe I'll go check what else is on Ask HN right now and see if there's anything else not really hacker-related", and I seen this thread.

JoachimSchipper• 14 years ago

If you are the kind of guy who likes HN, reading http://lesswrong.com/lw/6pf/new_post_version_1_please_read_t... and following up on its references may not be the worst idea. (This is empathically not a recommendation or endorsement.)

AznHisoka2• 14 years ago

sending you some good sentiments, my friend! A lot of great people I know have trouble in this area, so don't let it crush you. Best wishes.

Wilduck2• 14 years ago

I would pay to have my laundry done. Not dry cleaning, just plain, old, toss-it-in-the-washer laundry. I would pay a significant amount for this service. I wouldn't bat an eye at $30-40/load.

I don't care if someone comes and picks it up, or if I go somewhere to drop it off. I don't care if it's done by a professional service or by a 12 year old neighbor kid. I would pay you, and the whoever does my laundry, if you could connect me with someone.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Most laundries already do this. Don't they? Pick-up service, 24h, delivery.

Wilduck2• 14 years ago

Probably, but not in the Minneapolis area as far as I can tell. I found one place, but it's a 20 minute drive from where I live, which nullifies a lot of the benefit. This yelp add sums up the situation quite well:

http://www.yelp.com/topic/minneapolis-laundry-service-2

bmelton• 14 years ago

If you wouldn't bat an eye at $30-40 a load, then you're also priced pretty close into getting a maid. In most areas, you can get a maid for less than $100 a week.

If your primary focus was laundry, have her come by, throw a load into the wash, maybe clean a bit, or dust, then swap the load to the dryer while taking out the trash or something, then fold it.

It's a couple hours at best, and maid services tend to fall closer to minimum wage than not, and since most of the time doing laundry is waiting, you can have her fill the time with some miscellaneous cleaning.

srconstantin• 14 years ago

I have tried umpteen billion times to install Apache. I have wasted several full days trying and failing. I have a Mac. I must be retarded.

HN, what's bothering you?

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