Ask HN: What's your problem?

I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required for this:

   - Buying a Mac dev box
   - Learning Objective C
   - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

Failure to finish. I've had, to date, 7 ideas that, had I finished executing, I would have been first to market (in most cases, by years). I would have been beaten to market on one other product, and really close to tied with another few.

In imaginary-land, where I live, of the 7 companies I beat to market, 4 of them had million dollar + exits or acquisitions, so I COULD have been worth 45-55 million, give or take.

My number one challenge in doing anything is not having somebody else to motivate me, or even just tell me what to do. With almost everything I do, I solve the challenges first; the bits that otherwise make the product, or the bits that aren't obviously going to work... once I've built those out, the project is mentally done for me.

I will often fail to do the little things, the EASY things even, like building the change password page, or sending an email for account creation, etc. I'm so bad at it, even, that I will often stop after I have figured out HOW to solve the problems, without ever even bothering to actually implement.

So yeah, that's why I'm stuck with my 9-to-5. Good question.

I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always feel like email clients just aren't up to it.

I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

Problems faced by the denizens of this site are more likely to be well-served by what already exists.

Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world. That's where you find the big, underserved problems.

I have a big procrastination problem. An effective tool/strategy/app for reducing this procrastination could be massively useful to me.

My problems? Okay, I'll try to list them honestly. Try to build some startups from this:

1) It's too cold in Moscow. The gray sky sucks.

2) I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.

3) I can't easily find new people to play music together in a casual setting. I'd do this every couple days if it were simple.

4) Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them. Shutting off the phone sucks. Three girls at once give me so many worries that I wonder why I even bother.

5) Getting visas to foreign countries sucks, and air tickets are too expensive. Okay I can live with the ticket prices - my salary is high enough - but the visa humiliations are too much for me. You Americans have no idea.

6) The Flash platform is really poorly documented around the edges. I'd love to see something like quirksmode.org for Flash.

7) I can't seem to wake up early.

Personally, I have no significant problems that can be solved with technology.

However if you look around, there are far better places to go looking to solve problems then HN. The recession is plush with opportunity. Not just opportunity to help someone with some insignificant problem, but to truly help someone live better. Personally, I am doing pretty well but when i go back to the place where I grew up everywhere I look I see unemployment especially in young people in their 20's. I've spent a great deal of thought towards analyzing why this is. I've come to many conclusions, but in the end I think its an education system that prepared a large body of students for work in industry that was lifted up and handed to computers. So now there is at least one town (and I would imagine there are more) where there are young people eager to find a job. I feel like the internet is a great solution, the local economy may be devastated but the global economy probably still has something for them. Sites like etsy are one step towards this direction. I think if you can find something more specialized, with the principle of self employment. you have something special.

My problem is time. I am still a student in India where you have one exams after another and all on completely different levels. I want to do what I love with programming and be part of projects which interest me, whose products I use (best example would be Ubuntu), but I know if I start, I will only be able to do it for a couple of weeks and then its back to studying something totally unrelated. This on and off sessions keeps me totally out of shape for programming as I am not able to get good practice. I eagerly wait for the day when I am free to do what I love indefinitely.

Thanks to a habit of bad posture I'm very limited in how much work I can do. But terse code is often incomprehensible and English can't be compressed too much either. I want a way to reliably code/write without using my hands, and/or to minimise the number of input gestures I need to do.

I am bilingual (french/english), but one thing really bothers me: I never get to speak in English. I read books in English, I watch movies in English, I read/write in English, etc. but I never get the chance to practice my spoken English. The end result is that although I understand/write English very well, I lack confidence when talking. I wish I could _talk_ on the net so that I "get" the accent and intonation. The best scenario would be to be able to discuss about things I'm interested in at the same time (startups, programming, etc.). I could actually host a Ventrilo server (anyone interested?) until someone builds an app for that :D

Certain large, critical organizations that I work with have a paperwork process that goes:

1) Receive information through web form or email

2) Print it out

3) Scan it in to document management system.

There are whole offices of people whose job it is to do this.

Make this use case easier, or just parts of it; for all critical IT infrastructure that isn't core to my business:

I'm looking for a wiki program to run. I want to force people to login before they can read any of the wiki (it's for internal use). It also needs to support LDAP.

Currently, I load up Wikipedia and find their table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software). I can then take that table and import it directly into a Google Spreadsheet, which lets me do better filtering. Hopefully the table on Wikipedia has the fields for the comparison I want. If not, I have to go and fill out the list myself (and then add it to Wikipedia). I then spend the next few days playing around with the short list until I'm satisfied with my choice; then implement.

Thats all well and good. But I'm not the IT department! Okay, as a startup, I am, but it isn't core to my business. And I feel like it has got to be a solved problem. How about for inventory tracking? A trouble ticket system? Etc.

This shouldn't be that difficult.

Asking people what they use certainly helps, but they may or may not have the same requirements.

As an app, a better way to use tables on Wikipedia would be great (especially when things are split across multiple tables as the list of wiki software is).

(I'm not affiliated, but while writing up my use case, I came across this: http://www.wikimatrix.org )

How to figure out if my girlfriend will do kinky stuff. ;)

I want to read a Jquery book... I didn't succeed yet, I'm building a $20K project with that thing called Jquery, but it seems that I need to read something like 500 pages before being able to parse the DOM with ease.

I need to read it quickly, the project need to be complete within 1 month... or I'LL DIE :'( :'(

I need a web based wiki/concept-map hybrid.