Ask HN: What problem do you wish someone would solve?

"Is there a task or activity that regularly causes you grief during your day-to-day (no matter how big or small)?"

Yes, my job.

I wish I could switch jobs, but I'm tired of all the BS fanatical fluff in the posting, a lack of true expectations, and a lack of salary range. I don't see the hope that any other job will be better because the postings basically seem like a lie.

Better yet, if I could make money without a job. Although that's pretty unreasonable.

Well there is 'link rot' which is largely solved by Archive.org's Wayback Machine.

My only issues with Wayback are:

1.) Some Javascript-heavy sites fail to work because some assets/files were abstracted away with Javascript and were lost and oblivious to Wayback as it mirrored the page. Also: third party assets would be ignored which the JS site relied upon to function. So we get massive amounts of broken mirrored pages.

2.) Whilst Wayback honors robots.txt and won't mirror sites that deny/block their mirroring bot, it would be nice to have a service that ignores the robots.txt since we would have a clearer picture of the web at any given time. I don't believe robots.txt should dictate what content should/shouldn't be copied. Probably because of my data hoarding tendencies.

So if someone could create a service that accurately mirrors pages without a bunch of broken assets, and also ignores robots.txt that would be great!

I'm profoundly deaf and wear a hearing aid. Some of the modern hearing aids can connect directly to my iPhone, which means I can now hear audio from my phone very, very, very well. I used to hate talking on phones, but now I don't mind it at all. It's seriously a life-changer.

Unfortunately, modern hearing aids don't connect directly to Macbooks or iPads or anything else. They do make these dongles that can act as a connection bridge, but they're hundreds of dollars.

I'd love someone (hopefully at Apple) to figure out how to connect the iPhone-compatible hearing aids to Macbooks or iPads.

Signed, Deaf Guy wearing Giant Headphones that Look Stupid on Zoom Calls :)

I would love to have a searchable personal web archiving solution that works across devices. Something like https://github.com/i5ik/Diskernet or Webmemex but not implemented as a browser plugin but as a VPN with a self signed SSL certificate that I can configure on my mobile devices as well as on the Desktop. Personally I would only use this as a self-hosted solution because the security implications of MITM myself through a tunnel controlled by a third party are rather significant. I had a working prototype of this for a while and it was wonderful but debugging the edge cases took too much of my time as I’m not well versed with low-level networking. I would have loved to open source it but as it was started as a hacked together mess of configuration files that would have required me to rebuild it from scratch as a containerized solution. I have more time right now and if people round here would be interested in collaborating on a project that could give users autonomy over their digital history I’d be more than happy to have another go at it.

I'd love a single trusted website to manage my physical address and all my subscriptions/services - think Rippling for personal use. So if I move/change address I only have to do one update across all of financial services/mailing/e-commerce accounts. And then I can see a clear list of all my subscriptions and add/cancel/delete.

I'd love google to build this. But I'm not holding my breath. I'd refuse a Facebook version of this product (we all have our biases). An open source or crypto version would be cool.

Basically, what's my 'one account' for the internet, that everything runs from, and isn't Facebook?

[Edit] What I want that's different from current products is: address control in financial services/all platforms, subscription dashboard(s).

I have autistic traits so facial expressions and feelings are very hard for me to detect. An app or web service that helps me learn facial expressions (pictures next to expressions done by people) and gives tips about learning emotions woud really helpful. I haven't found one yet so if anyone knows of one that would be great

It'd be extra awesome if there were tests, like a mutlipe choice test on detecting the facial expression.

This is a straightforward problem: I would like to be able to surround words and phrases with () and "" in Chrome/FF.

Our IDEs and text editors allow us to do it [0], and I miss this feature in other software like browsers and MS Word. In a browser context, I would use this feature for writing search queries and emails using webmail (Gmail, Outlook Web, etc.). I found one relevant browser extension, but it is closed-source and has a bug.

0. https://i.imgur.com/85ywHmR.mp4

I would like to be able to easily take "audioshots" like I take screenshots: Press a button (ideally hardware like vol up + vol down) to retrospectively save the last ~30 sec of audio playing on my phone (podcast, song, news, phone calls), along with a link to source and a transcript. I listen to new music and podcasts while walking and running and this would greatly simplify bookmarking things that I want to follow up or relisten.

I want automations that help individuals reduce the time used on home maintenance tasks.

For example, emptying the dishwasher. I'd give up most of today's Internet in favor of automatically putting away the clean dishes, cutlery, pans, etc.

Getting dressed. Sometimes I spend tens of minutes trying out various combinations of garments until I strike a color/style/formality balance I like. Now, if there was a way to scan how my garments look on me, and to dress up a 3D model of myself, I could save time and get a better idea of how I look all-around.

Update all bookmark favicons in chrome-based browser without going to each site. That's it.

No, I don't want to use some website for bookmarks.

No, I don't want to use some extension instead of native bookmarks.

Using extension to update favicons in native bookmarks is fine. Also, mark dead sites while at it.

I hate shopping clothes so I want a website to sell me clothes optimized for my body and my preferences. I enter my height, weight, skin complexion, eye color, hair color, shoe size, and other body metrics into the site and my preferences, favorite color, what stitching patterns I like, whether I prefer wool or cotton, and things like that. Then the website should send me clothes that are guaranteed to fit and look good on me.

Keyboards should send the unicode of what is printed on the key (taking account of modifier keys like shift for upper case etc.), not just the position of the key that has been pressed. International keyboards and custom layouts would then work with no config. You could plug in a different keyboard for typing in different languages and it should just work.

The position should still be sent for special purposes, e.g. for gaming it probably doesn't make sense to move the keys around if the letters are in different places, or if the user wants to customise certain keys, and also for legacy systems that don't understand the unicode keys.

This should be standardised at the USB or Bluetooth level or below, not something that requires any sort of driver.