Ask HN: Share Your Pain

15 points by CharlieA 13 years ago | 22 comments

Great startup ideas spring from problems.

Plenty of people on HN have problems to solve.

Plenty of people on HN want to solve problems.

So, an experiment: share a pain point or problem you've had recently (even if it's more like a minor annoyance / not a tech-related problem) and maybe someone will think of a cool way of fixing it for you, prompting a slew of 'Show HN' posts to obliterate your problems.

If your life is completely pain free then more power to you, and soldier on, you lucky saint!

cellis 13 years ago |

I'd like someone to create an amazing Sublime Text 2 editor build for me. It would integrate a python debugger with stepping and breakpoints, as well as integrate an AS3 / Unity3D debugger. Failing being able to bolt the debugger on to the chrome of ST2, provide me with a nice debugger that works for all three languages and knows when i'm trying to "run" code from ST2.

It would also have amazing autocomplete for UnityScript, Actionscript and Python (e.g. for Python the autocomplete could determine return types from documentation and so forth). I've been thinking of trying to put all this together but I just don't have the time.

ljd 13 years ago |

Trivial Pain (if that): I was watching Storage Wars last night and I couldn't help but wonder about bidding patterns.

The show has such a rich data set and their bidding strategies are so simple that I would love to see someone break down the metrics on that show. It's rare that someone has chronologically recorded all bets of all competitors and followed up on the asset value after the purchase.

Strangely, this reality TV show could be sitting on valuable information about how people bid and how to predict a successful auction.

ebiester 13 years ago | |

The problem is we only see a small subset of the bids. Any bids that the main characters aren't playing on won't be shown, will they? This will lead to selection bias.

ljd 13 years ago | | |

This is a great point. I imagine whoever wanted to do the analysis would call Storage Wars and try to get them to work with you and give missing information such as that. It would be good PR for them to help out.

I'm mainly interested in how large the leaps are from competing bid to bid relative to the margin actually realized from liquidating the unit. My intuition says that the jumps will be larger on high margin units and they'll be more fine detailed when lower margin is present. Essentially, you're crowd sourcing the value of the unit.

While that may seem obvious, if this was proven to be true the best bets would be very small incremental jumps above the current high bid to signal low margin. If you did that you could convince the other bidder that you have information he doesn't have and since no one wants to be involved in a low margin liquidation the opposing bidder would have an incentive to bow out.

It's creating the allusion of information asymmetry.

WillyF 13 years ago |

I'd love a Mac app that allows me to select text on a web page and copy the HTML for a link to the page with the selected text as the anchor text. It would save me a ton of time every day.

daliusd 13 years ago | |

ClickBoard extension for Chrome does almost that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bnahceedpdkaiojgdp...

I have not looked into that too much but I guess it is possible to find extension that does exactly what you need. Maybe even this extension could do that with some custom settings.

SuperChihuahua 13 years ago |

My current pain is the amount of different algorithms within the field machine learning.

And Ive also collected 20000 pains before from twitter, or needs actually: http://www.ideaoverload.com/Find-ideas/New-ideas/Methods-gen...

Probably going to find a ml algo to sort them a little bit better

forcer 13 years ago |

We have several websites/products where we need to have fast connectivity servers. At the moment is very hard to rely on reviews/sales reps or finding speed tests on hosting provider sites to determine which hosting is faster than other - and there are huge differencess. we find it hard way by buying 1 month and then realizing its slow and moving on to the next provider.

vijayr 13 years ago |

Apartment renting - CL sucks, it is filled with spammers. Brokers charge heavily, and in general, I don't feel like paying a lot of money to a broker, as I don't think they add too much value (it is different when buying a property though)

botolo 13 years ago |

My pain is having many ideas for startups and not being able to develop them for lack of coding skills and lack of interest in coding. Give me a drag&drop development system and you will make me happy :)

ebiester 13 years ago | |

http://www.wavemaker.com/

Make your MVP in this. You can work out many of the kinks in the idea from this, and get the idea of the flow down. From there,

http://www.balsamiq.com/

and you can start thinking about what your design should really look like. Between the two, you should have a better chance of sharing your vision with someone else.

yolesaber 13 years ago | |

A drag-and-drop system would severely limit your options and creativity. Compare coding in HTML/JS/CSS to using Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

Furthermore, you are posting on a site full of engineers and developers. If you are really interested in building something, drop me a line. My email is in my profile.

yirt 13 years ago | |

That's easy enough already if you're willing to pay for it.

botolo 13 years ago | | |

I am totally willing. I have tried to recruit someone on oDesk and other similar platforms but the experience has been bad so far.

AznHisoka 13 years ago |

My pains:

1) Satisfying my physical/emotional intimacy needs (the physical is the bigger pain) 2) Commuting without being surrounded by strangers.

Go build a startup to solve those pains for me :)

daliusd 13 years ago | |

Buy bicycle. It will solve second problem and will benefit for solving first one. While you might need psychological help on first one (I don't know you so it is hard to recommend properly).

toomuchcoffee 13 years ago | |

Taking care of (1) is easy - you just have to:

- chill the f* out

- act natural

- lower your standards

It's that simple. Alcohol is known to help with the last step, btw.

why-el 13 years ago | |

Is your commuting time long? It really depends but I find that commuting is the best chance I have to catch up on some reading.

Mz 13 years ago | |

Not a startup, but I blog a lot about how to solve problems like your first one.

erpa1119 13 years ago |

A way to explore pain points by industry:

Ideally a website where domain experts can share their business and industry pain points with a community of developers, entrepreneurs, etc. for us entrepreneurs to explore, give and get feedback.

tissarah 13 years ago | |

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3664769

also there are quite a few pain point threads if you run a quick search