Ask HN: If you could automate one thing in your home, what would it be?

Would you rather it happen automatically or after you give a voice command such as "Shower On" or something similar? Having the water pre-heat would be very cool. The problem would be knowing when to start heating the water. Assuming the home owner doesn't follow a perfect schedule, a voice command would be the most effective. Another possible solution is that the water starts heating when you enter the bathroom. Motion detection isn't that difficult, so the latter might actually be the better solution. It would depend on how long it takes to heat the water to the desired temperature.

Oddly enough, the most difficult part of this would probably be folding the clothes. Take a towel for instance. When I want to fold a towel, I begin by searching for the corners of the towel. As it turns out, this is a rather difficult problem for robots to solve.

Unfortunately, however, robots might be the most practical solution to this problem.

It could definitely be achieved, it's just a matter at engineering a new type of washer/dryer. What I don't understand is why washers and dryers are separate entities. Yes, engineering a machine that both washes and drys clothes would be difficult, but I'm confident that it could be done.

This is definitely one of the more difficult options!

One more thing: ironing.

I don't think that it is impractical at all! Certainly it would take a feat of engineering, but it is certainly possible. Check out my response to gatsby.

I've thought about this too but rather than having two machines...

Why not have a washer/dryer work in one machine? Put your cloths in and it starts to wash, once the water is rinsed out it begins to dry.

Edit: So apparently there is such a thing! http://goo.gl/CWgKD (redirects to sears.com listing of such machine)

Self-cleaning bathrooms is a good start, because bathrooms are typically dirty. Why stop there though? As we go farther, the problem gets substantially more complex, but imagine a system where cleaning bots were small enough to travel through your walls. They clean while you sleep, so as not to inconvenience you.

One possible problem would be transporting the cleaning materials. I think small in-wall robots would be very effective, but they wouldn't be large enough to carry a lot of cleaning fluids. Having to travel back and forth to a central hub to reload could be costly as far as time is concerned, but poses an interesting path-finding problem.

What about groceries? Sorting them, buying them, keeping track of current stock?

Air compression is a valid solution here, if I am understanding what you're asking for. The trick would be developing a silencer for the compression tank similar to that of a firearm.

Check this out:

http://youtu.be/otYAm6OXnH8

So you are talking about giving the house a full personality? That's a fairly interesting idea and I'm not sure if it's an active area of research.

It seems like giving the house a personality would require a huge advance in natural language processing. I don't think it would be a practical idea until a machine is built that can pass the Turing test with flying colors.

It will happen in the future, for sure. The question is when.

Good idea! This isn't something that I had considered.

I imagine it would be very similar to cleaning inside. An autonomous lawn mower and robots for things such as edging would be cool, but, again, it would be a sticky situation.

Here's the rub: A lot of people keep their dishes in a cabinet above the counter, so there is empty space between the dish washer and the cabinets where the dishes should end up.

I can't think of a way around this at the moment except the possibility of in-wall dishwashers. In-wall ovens exist, so why not change dishwashers, washers and dryers to do the same?

Not everyone is a fan of jewelry, so maybe a thumb scanner would be more effective? The most important part is that only appropriate parties are aloud to open the doors. The same techniques could be applied to windows.

Why not just a remote in the keychain like we've been doing with cars for ages? I seriously don't get why this is not the norm yet.

https://lockitron.com/ is close to that

Another consideration is that you might want the temperature to increase over time. I love hot showers, but I don't want the water to scald me as soon as I turn it on.

Again, this would mean a hyper-intelligent home far beyond the realm of current artificial intelligence capabilities. At the very least, we would require a machine that could pass the Turing test and, from there, we would have to make it understand emotion.

The day of the butler and maid will soon be past, and the home itself will be your steward.

Nest (http://www.nest.com/) is already working on a thermostat that solves this problem. I can't imagine it would be hard to adapt it for hot tubs as well. On an unrelated note, I really want a hot tub.

Wasn't there an entire town in the USA where they connected the refrigerators up to a automatic restocking system. Or have I imagined that?

This would definitely be an interesting development, but I think there are a number of concerns here.

First off, that would be a lot of tubes. This problem immediately screams a graphing problem with, at the very least, number_of_cities * average_number_of_homes_per_city nodes. Even with that many nodes, the systems would be terribly inefficient.

Secondly, consider that not all packages are the same size. In addition to have a standard-sized tube, we would also need a number of tubes to handle over-sized cargo and, since we can't realistically run one of these to every home, we would still have a use for the offices of UPS and FedEx.

Another thing that worries me are the implications on us humans. If we can have everything sent to our house without ever leaving, we would all become recluses and never go outside.

I don't really know how to respond to this one, but I definitely got a good laugh out of it. Let us know if you discover anything!