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Ask HN: So, what is your problem?
34 points by leftnode on Nov 26, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 69 comments
We're all aware that if we're going to spend time building software, it should actually solve someones problem.

We also know that ideas are easy to come by, but solvable problems are harder.

So, what is your problem that needs solving? Either you'll get a response to something you didn't know existed that solves your problem, or someone might start working on a solution for it.




I have a major frustration with payment providers — even contemporary players like Stripe — that can't offer a 3rd party payments system. That is, anything resembling a "marketplace" where you sell things on behalf of someone else, take a cut and pass on the rest to the content creator requires the integrator to come up with a half-assed payout pipeline. This often results in sending cheques and/or making PayPal payments.

My dream would be a product offering that offered pass-through payment processing, so my vendors have an account and give my store a key. Payments go directly to the vendor, and a pre-negotiated amount or percentage is automatically collected and sent to me. Both me and the vendor pay the same processing rate.

I have several concepts I'd love to build and launch, but all of them fall down because I can't easily justify a 2x2.9% transaction fee.


Actually, you can do this with Stripe Connect [1]. The end-user signs up with a Stripe account, you get an OAuth key, and can make charges on their account. You can also collect fees on top of any payments [2].

[1]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect [2]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees


Thank you so much! I don't know how I missed that.


Here you go :)

http://balancedpayments.com


Thanks for the link! I didn't specify that it would have to work outside of the US, which is my mistake.

That said, I had no idea this existed and it's definitely on my radar now. Thank you again.


Have you thought about forming a US corporation (C Corp or LLC)? Yes, you would have to pay some taxes, but you could choose a low/ no tax burden state like Delaware or Wyoming.

Assign a local agent, with physical/ mailing address, and open a US business banking account is pretty much all there is to it (not all). I've actually considered offering this as a service, but convincing myself there is an actual need has been difficult.


If you can reduce the act of registering a Delaware C Corp and opening a US bank account to entering my billing details, you'll have my business.


I understand Balanced is trying very hard to get into CA as well, so they may be a viable solution for you soon.


I think both Amazon Flexible Payments and PayPal Adaptive Payments support everything you're asking for. They're separate products from Amazon Simple Payments and PayPal Website Standard / PayPal Pro which, as you know, can't be used for that kind of business.


Sadly, Amazon doesn't support Canadians yet.

I have a personal policy: I will never build a business that relies on a PayPal product. I've read too many horror stories about frozen accounts where people were punished for being successful to risk my client's money with them.


I've been on the receiving end of it so believe me when I say it royally sucks


I pay $X for clothing (I haven't calculated it, but assume it's relatively average for a man who doesn't wear suites). I'll pay $2X if you can make me well dressed.

Key point: I need to trust that your decisions are correct. What I want to pay for is not thinking about this and knowing that it's handled.


Try Trunk Club: http://www.trunkclub.com/

They do a brief interview with you over the phone, get your measurements, and send you a trunk of clothes every month. You only pay for what you keep. My friends have been very satisfied with that they've gotten.


One major factor in appearing well dressed is having clothes that fit properly. Even expensive clothes look bad when they're not the right size and cut. It may be cool if a startup could curate clothes that match both style and body type.

This could exist by the way, I don't know of any off the top of my head though. Bonobos.com is the only thing that comes to mind. They're not specifically doing the above, but I think they offer a variety of fits/sizes. I've had a good experience with them in the past.


Some companies do computerized made-to-measure clothes. These reportedly work pretty well, but the lead time and effort required by the consumer is very large. The ones I know about only do business wear.


Style consultants exist, but good ones seem to cost more than the price of a street clothes wardrobe (and even then there's no guarantee). I think style is too personal for a low-cost stranger to have an information advantage.

As for shops that tend to have good looking clothes, those already exist. Unfortunately full packages must be built manually from modular components, and little progress has been made on systemic solutions to this problem.


I can't guarantee that it will work, but there are some really good sites and shows out there that exist to help guys like us learn to dress stylishly without breaking the bank or needing to learn a whole domain of stuff that we aren't terribly interested in.

For example, I'm a big fan of Put This On:

http://putthison.com/

The blog is great, and the web series is really great.

http://putthison.com/post/10287901291/put-this-on-season-one


Thread (https://www.thread.com/) is a startup aimed exactly at trying to solve this problem. It matches you to professional stylists for free. (I'm not particularly certain what it's monetization strategy is, I suspect it has something to do with a cut of your online clothes purchases or advertising or something.)


Sounds like what this guy was trying to solve for I think: http://sharktankclips.com/season-4-episode-2-alpha-m/


I am a woman. I want this too. I have yet to see any sort of clothing service for women, but I would definitely prefer to never think about clothes ever again, but still be well dressed.


Bonobos does this already at about that price point. Just buy all your clothes from there and you will be good.


Probably not worth solving, certainly not something I would solve myself but...

I'm up late all the time working. True nightowl you could say. The earliest I'd go to bed is 6am. I sleep during the day and wake up around noon at the latest. I don't lack sleep, this schedule works for me. Point is, I'm up late and I'm sure there are others like me.

I get hungry often. I don't cook. Few places if any are open. Those that do are unknown (what little and inccurately Yelp tries to cover with hours filtering) and certainly don't deliver.

Broken solution, I'd like a list of all places open late, what they serve, and a way to get it delivered. I'd pay premium for it. I would task rabbit it or something but I don't know many rabbits working that late and certainly not a good enough resource to figure out what places are open. Not changing my sleep schedule either, f that.


What does "I don't cook" mean? You don't like to cook? You don't know how to cook? You don't have the physical means of cooking?

To me that sounds like the real problem to solve.


I can cook some basic dishes, but I don't want to. I don't want to learn how to cook more stuff. I don't want to exert time or effort towards doing so, and the cost savings, etc... don't really matter to me. I've been eating out almost exclusively for the most part in the last 15 years. Might not be the healthiest or most ideal, but not really the issue I'm addressing here. My original point is I want a list of places open late, what they serve, and a way to get food delivered. I'd pay a premium for that. I'm sure other nightowls working late in the bay (anywhere too) would too even if they can cook, etc...


The commenter will have to come to that conclusion on his/her own, if ever. You projecting your values on to them in a patronizing tone that doesn't answer his challenge is not a helpful contribution to the conversation.


Wow. I was going to write a reply, but then I realized your own comment is a perfect reply to itself!


Given how few places are open at, say, 1am, Yelp tends to work fine. Just use the 'open now' filter


It does not. I even specifically mentioned this in my OP. Yelp filters are busted because most of the hours posted on many establishments on Yelp are off basis in my experience. Some lack hours altogether.


Sorry, missed that part.

Out of curiosity, where do you live? AFAIK, Yelp's hours are user-submitted, so you might just be in a place with low yelp usage.

I reside in their home city (SF), and I've rarely ever had issues with faulty hours. In your case, you might just need to hire someone to collect the data, since individually no one has enough incentive to do so.


It sounds like that would be solved by some sort of 24 hr personal delivery service ... preferably local to you and on some form of cheap transport like a bike. Its been attempted at least once before ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com


The focus on finding problems to fix is a bit shortsighted. Focus on building what is missing. Somehow, hackers seem to forget this important detail. A problem that is fixed is no longer a problem. But building something that was missing is now a tool used my many.

Facebook does not fix a problem. It built something that was missing (a good social network). Google did not fix the search problem. Is built something that was missing (a better way to search back then). AirBnB does not fix a problem. It built something that was missing (a platform for temporary private housing rentals). Twitter did not fix the blogging problem. It built something that was missing (a way for people to communicate quickly without much friction).

Look around. What is missing? Go build it.


Anything that is missing can be re-phrased as a problem to fix.

e.g. It's really hard to keep up with what's going on in all my friends' lives It's hard to find stuff on the Internet if I don't know who hosts that information Hotels are too expensive for medium-length stays


Ever since google killed sharing within google reader itself (they meshed it into Google+) there is no way for 1st tier content junkies (i.e. people who have a ton of RSS feeds) to share good reads with each other. Twitter has horrible S/N, no one is on Google+ and if they were it would have same problem as twitter. Sharing within Google Reader was perfect b/c the majority of people who used Reader were other content junkies. HN does this but only for 50 stories a day and isn't curated from content junkies with my shared interests.


Check out NewsBlur. 3/4 of the GReader junkies I know moved there. (including me)


I'd love to have an easier way to get involved in some open source project for improving my skills, enhancing my CV, etc.

My main challenge is being overwhelmed with information and I can't seem to find a good place to get started on any project.


"I'd love to have an easier way to get involved in some open source project for improving my skills, enhancing my CV, etc."

Not to sound trite, but I don't think the reasons you enumerated for contributing to a project would give most people enough incentive to spend the energy figuring out how to contribute to most projects. Find the project that makes you go "yeah!" and you'll find it much easier to get acclimated to whatever it is, because you'll really want to understand how it works.


There's actually lots of opportunity for this. It's way easier to get involved in open source now than it ever was.

- GitHub, Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge, CodePlex, ...

- Google Summer of Code, Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, OpenHatch, ...

Getting involved in open source is easy, there's way too many projects that die or go unmaintained because there's no one to help. I have a few projects that could use contributors, but I assume you want to get involved in an active, serious, and popular open source project. Whatever project you're interested in, subscribe to their mailing list (won't hurt to introduce yourself), join their IRC channel, look at their open issues, grep the source for TODOs, look for something to improve, and submit your patch.


I remember someone saying, "if you don't know where to start, search for '//TODO:' on Github." :)


Do you have any sources that elaborate? I've actually spent several hours trying to figure out how to contribute to open source, and given up out of frustration.


That makes 2 of us! ;)


I know that feeling. One of the best ways is to just ask one of the developers on a project you like. There's always something to do.


That's a good approach to it :)


I have a poor sense of how I spend all my time, and that leads to sub-optimal decision making. I've been building a web app to easily track my time usage and display it as a historical calendar, and adding features to get the most insight out of reflecting on it (running stats, notes, etc.) The most recent handy feature was an xmpp chat bot interface for lowering the friction on adding data.

The inspiration was the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", which jives with the observation that how one spent their time last month is a better predictor of their future than how they wish they would spend this month. People have a lot of inertia, but tend not to notice.

I'd be especially interested in any tips about research on past-time perception.


I have a hard time getting myself to do things and stick to them.

I want to bet against myself; to put down money that I will complete a task, so that the only way to get my money back is to finish what I start.

For example, I want to teach myself machine learning but find it hard to concentrate and stick through an online program. I would go to this site, put down "$80" as a bet, "a certificate of completion email for "Machine Learning 101" from stanford.edu" as proof, and "December 30" as a deadline.

The website then bills my credit card for $80, and only refunds that amount back if a moderator receives the certificate of completion email from stanford.edu, verifying that I did complete the task. If the website moderator doesn't get the proof by the deadline, I don't get my money back.

The task could be anything, but the proof would have to be very difficult to fake, and would require some effort on the part of the website moderator to enforce.

I would love to make this service/website myself, as it would help people and be profitable, the only issue is that /I/ want to use the service as well, and by its very nature someone else would have to run it for it to work for me.


Something kind of close is www.beeminder.com where you can pick a goal, keep track of your progress, and have an auto-forfeit sum of money. It doesn't have verification built in, but it's part way there.


Thanks!

From that site I found this[1], which appears to be the closest existing service. The only problems are:

1. Bad site design.

2. Focused on exercising.

3. You have to choose who the money goes to. This could easily be an excuse to not complete the task, as giving up results in someone else benefiting.

4. No third party that judges whether or not you completed the task. You have to find someone yourself (they recommend family members and friends).

#4 is the biggest problem for me. The crux of the service is that you can't back out on a whim, so having a strict, default third party is essential.

[1] http://www.stickk.com


I would like more users to register my side project (http://getmousetrack.com), but I can't seem to convert anyone who visits the project site. At this point, I think I would pay for some service that gives me honest feedback on my landing page and maybe suggest ways to improve conversion rates.


A few suggestions:

1. Increase the padding on nearly all the divs; the text is too close to the borders.

2. Remove the "Confirm Password" field. IMO the risk that the few people who mistype their password will never return is worth making it easier for the rest.

3. The video could be shorter. You don't need the 4 second title before the video starts, and the simulation of the signup process takes too long and is boring to watch. Edit the video so that the text fields are filled in as quickly as the viewer can see them filled in, not as fast as it actually takes.

4. Consider adding a few bullet points outlining the benefits of being able to track users' mouse movements.

5. A unique icon would be nice.

6. Make the "Sign Up" button a unique color so that it stands out.


1. Agreed

2. Meh, doesn't matter

3. Yes

4. Agree, I signed up and am intrigued, but still not totally clear on what it does.

5 and 6. Sure.

7. How do I add it to a wordpress blog? (just wondering, not a criticism).


You've got a useful product, it's just that I have no clue that it is one. I'd suggest you throw away the video for a list of features, or something that'll highlight how quick and easy it is to use your product. Check out good landing pages of other startups. (They're a dime a dozen, think Shopify, Stripe etc.) Six Revisions has a good article on the basics you'll need for a landing page. (http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/designing-landing-p...) If you're not much of a designer yourself, you could consider paying a little bit over at 99Designs and getting a landing page out.


There are already a lot of services that do exactly that. I remember one that was pretty addictive where you'd give feedback on other people's sites in exchange for points that you could use to get feedback on your own.

But some quick googling should turn up a lot of similar sites.

And by the way, I don't want to be harsh, but you don't even tell visitors what your service does. How do you expect to convert anyone?


http://www.feedbackarmy.com/

"Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website.

Start a usability test for your site in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive 10 responses from our reviewers. The cost is $20."

I know folks that have used them, and loved it.


Nothing outside of the video suggest what Mousetrack is or does.

You should have a few bullet points highlighting what Mousetrack does and why it's useful.

You should remove the registration process from the video, because everyone knows what registering an account is and how to do it. It currently takes up almost 50% of the video itself.

It's really hard to see what's going on in the video because I can't full-screen the video, and the text is quite small when highlighting and copying the script.


Create a tagline. I should be able to figure out what I'm looking at in 5 seconds, not ~40 seconds.


Your homepage does not tell me what your service is. Your video does not tell me what your service is.

Add some text that explains what I'm looking at, what it costs, and why it's better than similar offerings.


I get lots of email from cron jobs. I probably spend 5-10 minutes every day clicking through them and making sure that there's nothing "odd" in them which needs my attention.

I would love to have some software which reads my cronmail, figures out what's "normal", and warns me when something isn't normal.


Is there no way for you to create filters to solve this right now? Or is it too complex the way the reporting comes out?


I don't know the scope of Colin's cron problems, but filtering out mail in this case seems like a less preferable solution than simplifying the way cron does email to begin with. Filtering e-mail in this case is like putting your fingers in your ears when you walk by a loud stereo you've left on instead of just turning it off. As a developer, cron doesn't give me a lot of control over where e-mail is sent unless I jump through hoops to give myself that control. Ignoring the complexity of the reports, and the fact that filters like that don't easily scale across different recipients, the fact is that cron's e-mail capability is extremely coarse-grained. For every run of every job, the entire output is e-mailed out to the address specified in the crontab. This gets very unwieldy.

I've had to write cron table entries with a blank mail recipient in the crontab itself, and handle the specific mailing cases in the job script. This sucks. I'm not sure I think the solution is something that reads cron-mail and automatically generates filters, but I would very much like it if cron supported e-mail lists based on return codes or something else like that.


Use passive nagios alerts. Or something like Cronologger.


1. I want to finish my CS bachelors degree online from somewhere reputable

2. I want an "Uber for babysitters" (yes I know of sitter city and the like, not impressed) ... we are very last-minute and spontaneous so our regular sitters aren't always available.

3. I often want to try making new/different cocktails but I never have all the ingredients ... ("birchbox for cocktails"?)

4. I have a close female family member that is overweight/obese and on a trajectory to get worse. No one else in the family knows how to help or even approach the subject.


I have an infiniti with a backup cam. When it rains, the thing is sometimes useless. I'd like a windshield wiper thing or equivalent solution for that camera.


This isn't my problem, but some of my friends were talking about it: something like Kickstarter, but for consultants. The genius of Kickstarter is the "transactional" (in the database sense of the word, wherein a set of operations is packaged so that either all happen or none do) nature of the thing: either the money is raised, or not; and if not, it's all returned to pledgers. If the consultant gets enough pledges/work to cover the next N months (N = 8 to 12) then they get the money and can start out as consultants. If they don't, the money goes back and they continue with their day jobs.

One of the problems with consulting is that it's really hard for most people, while employed, to line up enough work that they can become consultants in the first place. Most people will never get the chance, even if they have the talent, because they can't front the initial financial cost. This keeps a lot of people out of self-employment who would otherwise be a better fit for it.

The Kickstarter-esque idea seems strong, but the biggest problem with this idea is that people who have serious ($150+ per hour) work to offer generally don't solicit on the Internet if they can help it. They prefer to source through word-of-mouth, which is pre-technological and broken and leads to that imbecilic situation where you have to be in to get in... but I don't make the rules.

That's why I haven't pursued it. It's one of those startups that requires fixing people, and any startup that goes long on human nature is facing extremely bad odds.


Not everyone should be freelancers. (You used the term consultants, but my gut tells me that you mean freelancer, which is a different thing.) When I first started out as a freelancer, what I lacked was not ability but connections. Freelancers without a solid network of people who speak well of them will spend a disproportionate amount of time looking for engagements.

That said, someone who wants to make this transition needs to save enough for perhaps 3-4 months of not having a salary. If they can't pull that together, there might be deeper reasons behind them sticking to a salaried position. It's not likely the availability of work, because right now there are so many more opportunities than there are capable applicants in tech, you'd have to be trying hard to not find opportunities.

Factually, the problem with the idea you present (Kickstarter-esque capacity scheduling) is that every freelancer is different, there is no apples to apples comparison possible. Likewise, are you going to take every customer that is willing to pay you? I sure hope not.

I recommend that you block off some time and read The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. It is free online and seriously worth your time if you plan to work as a freelancer.

http://www.winwithoutpitching.com/manifesto?toc


The Kickstarter model doesn't work for consultant. It's about wants vs. needs: the kickstarter model is for wants, consultants are for needs.

If I pledged to a kickstarter project to buy yet another iphone case and the project failed to launch, I'll just have to make do without yet another iphone case. No big deal.

If I need to hire a consultant to build an e-commerce website or to set up a payroll system, I need that to happen no matter what. I can't wait 21 days only to find out the consultant never gets enough pledges to "launch." Then what? Pledge to another consultant, wait another 21 days and rinse and repeat?


This is a great idea. I guess it would be more like contracting though. The ideal case would be oversubscription: Stuff that needs to be built really benefit of having several prototypes built, and the best approach selected for further development.


I work on numerical simulations, where I deal with colossal arrays of floating point numbers on hundreds or thousands of nodes. I want tools that can help with the following:

1. Visualizing code. Rendering C++ and/or Fortran as LaTeX would be very helpful for lines of code like this, where I've spent too much time tracking down misplaced parens:

    k1(1,1)=-Im*(Omega_minus_n*(rho13(i,j)+conjg(rho12(i,j)))-Omega_plus_n*(rho12(i,j)+conjg(rho13(i,j))))+gamma1*(rho22(i,j)+rho33(i,j))
2. A better way to debug and test mathematical programs. Debugging is extremely hard when you have thousands of processes doing calculations that aren't reproducible by hand, so it's very difficult or impossible to create test cases for subunits of the program. The only tests are Fermi calculations and comparison of the whole program's output with an analytical solution, which is often not possible, and is not useful for debugging.

3. A language with the following characteristics: - Within 10% of Intel/PGI Fortran on tight numerical loops - Array and distributed/concurrent syntax with lightweight threads and syntactical support for GASnet/MPI. - Parallel load balancing, preferably across nodes. A few of the algorithms I use are adaptive or have parts of the solution domain that require much more work than other parts, leading to situations where naive/maintainable MPI code leaves most processors idle. - Hindley-Milner type inference, typeclasses/typeclass-like features, operator overloading/syntax extension, and effortless interoperation with C/Fortran. An IDE with syntax rendering like Maple or Mathematica's would be a HUGE plus. I don't know why this doesn't exist for usably fast languages. - Supports an interactive mode with easy visualization

The closest language I've seen is Cray's Chapel, but there are several things I don't like about it. Its imperative/oo design and lack of first class functions/tco are unacceptable, since the algorithms I use need to use the integer side of the machine as well as the floating point ones. Right now I use either Charm++ (http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/) with Intel's array syntax, or Fortran 2008 for some inherited code. C++ has non-ideal semantics for numerical code, and doing non-trivial algorithms in Fortran is still a nightmare, especially when using MPI, as communication code quickly becomes the main part of the program. Something like Sisal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sisal/), if it was modernized and extended to distributed architectures, would be amazing. It used to beat typical Fortran by 20%.

4. I absolutely need to account for cache behavior, otherwise my simulations will take months to run instead of weeks. I would love anyone who wrote a practical tool that automatically tiled loops, since doing this manually turns code into an unmaintainable rat's nest very quickly, or wrote a library of skeletons for tiled loops and cache oblivious algorithms.


Re 3: I don't think anything like this exists yet (as you've described close to the "holy grail" of numerical languages ;-) ), but you might want to check out Julia[1] if you haven't done so yet. It doesn't do everything you want, but has decently good performance, makes it easy to call C libs (and Fortran I think), and is doing some interesting things with parallelization. Unfortunately it doesn't yet have MPI support, the performance you want, etc. but it's a very new language with an active community, and I think it has goals compatible to yours.

Re 1: As yolesaber said, most decent IDEs/editors should give you tools to deal with parens. As for pretty-printing equations: I used to have a Perl script that would convert code to LaTeX according to certain rules, but it's lost in a previous job's IP. Still, this should be reasonably achievable with a set of regexs + LaTeX assuming you use a consistent syntax throughout for your equations, without too many ambiguous cases. :)

[1] http://julialang.org/


In regards to 1: Any decent editor should have highlighted parens matching. What do you use for coding?


Emacs, but it's still hard to do. That code excerpt is nothing compared to what I have worked with in some code I no longer I have access to; some of the formulas stretched on for about 6 lines of 80 chars each. It's not so much the unbalanced parens as it is about having the wrong thing in the denominator of a gigantic multilevel fraction.




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