HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the problem you try to solve?

55 points by acemtp ↗ HN
We see everyday startups/projects pitches that explain what they do. There're often on hackernews lists the describe what the startups do.

But can you, in less than 140 characters, describe the PROBLEM your project/startup tries to resolve?

122 comments

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kfk
I'll describe you my latest project.

Paying outdoor writers and photographers competitive prices for their works and delivering users amazing stories in well designed, modern, web pages, only online, no print.

Link to a sample article ("real" ones will have better writing then this): http://acivitillo.com/articles/2013/vistula

canvsly
Canvsly helps parents everyday go clutter free and guilt free by helping them save their kids artwork
mindcrime
140 characters? Probably not, but this is a relatively concise summary of the problem we're working on:

--

Knowledge workers spend too much time looking for information and knowledge[1] instead of, you know, thinking about problems. Organizations can be more effective when they provide tooling and processes to encourage and support knowledge sharing and transfer, and more efficient information retrieval.

---

[1]: according to some research, up to 50% of knowledge workers' time is spent just looking for stuff. But to be fair, other research puts the number as low as 17%. Still, we believe that facilitating more efficient knowledge use, transfer and creation, will benefit all organizations.

adamzerner
More concise summary:

Give workers the information they need so they could spend more time thinking/building.

mindcrime
It's interesting, actually... that's definitely more concise, but I find myself wondering if it's better. What I mean is - I don't argue against being concise, but wonder "is there a point where you're so concise that you've reduced your message to a platitude that doesn't actually say anything"?

For example, we could reduce it further by saying:

"Make things better".

But I don't think that would be a very useful message.

So this, to me, is the struggle... to figure out how to be as concise as possible, while not being overly concise.

I freely admit that I'm not great at this, but it is something I hope to get better at - distilling the message to its essence, without losing the essence.

In this particular case, I will say that "Give workers the information they need so they could spend more time thinking/building" probably does strike that balance fairly well. I may have to crib that from you. :-)

Anyway, the point in saying all this was just to point out that while conciseness is a virtue, it can - I think - be taken too far if one isn't careful.

adamzerner
I agree, but it depends on the context. In this case, they were just asking what the problem is, not to prove that it is indeed a problem.
markrickert
Problem I'm currently working on: How to make a long tail of passive income.
jbrooksuk
Me too. I've got ideas, but nothing with a real market.
abraininavat
Forgive the ignorance, but what does this mean?
girvo
Think affiliate marketing, or niche product creation (targeted ebooks and the like), that require a bit of upfront effort, but little ongoing maintenance, and can scale out to many of these products/revenue streams. Lots of ongoing small hits, rather than one big payoff for one big product :)
markrickert
That's exactly it. Lots of small products with microtransactions targeted towards niche markets that i barely have to touch.

Passive income generation is one of the pinnacles of what we as software engineers can do.

antocv
Should I stay or should I go

Nah but really, I try to solve the music listening and artist compensation problem on my spare time. Without regard for copyright since Im not doing it to make money.

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adrianh
Amateur guitarists can't read sheet music, so they use tablature. But online tablature sucks.

Soundslice: http://www.soundslice.com/

dougk16
I love your effort here, and have been meaning to ask...are you working on some means to parse old-school TXT tabs from other tab sites into your format? I always thought that would be a really interesting problem to solve, especially trying to detect alternate tunings and tempos and such. You would probably need a human to come in to do a polish pass afterwards most of the time, but still might be a net win.
adrianh
Hey, thanks! We'll likely eventually do that, but it's low on the priority list. There are some more structured formats (e.g., Guitar Pro) that we're doing first.
davidw
Not having as much money/control over my life as I want.
ew
Data has gravity, and too much of it makes migrating or backing up cloud storage very hard. Mover (https://mover.io) helps SMEs move their data.
mcintyre1994
People use Email as a todo list, which sucks. Nobody wants to swap from email, and converting emails into a list of tasks is lame.
czbond
Agreed. How are you attempting to solve. This is my big bad habit.
mcintyre1994
The focus is on time based tasks right now, my idea is automatically building tasks by finding and extracting times. At launch it'll probably be a case of copy/paste emails in and get tasks added; the obvious next step being adding by forwarding an email. I'd almost be in a position to get a demo working if it weren't for exams :)
abraininavat
the obvious next step

Not so obvious to me. Consider browser plugins, desktop application (e.g. Outlook) plugins, letting users grant your service access to their online email, etc.

mcintyre1994
You're definitely right that there are other options, and I'll be reconsidering that approach closer to the time based on what's easiest/most important for actual users. Thanks for the comment :)
23andwalnut
Almost all project management apps have a monthly fee and are SaaS apps. This isn’t appropriate for all businesses.

Duet has a one time fee and is hosted on your own server.

http://duetapp.com

girvo
Oh wow. I've been looking for something like this. Amazing :)
MWil
I sent you an email just now about updates to duet and activating since it doesn't seem to be on Envato's site any longer
OafTobark
It sounds like source code available for adding extras when purchased. What is this built in?
23andwalnut
Yes, the source is available. It's built with php and javascript. It has an MVC architecture, but I didn't use any frameworks. It should be pretty simple to pick up if you're familiar with the concepts of MVC or you've worked with backbone in the past...
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acemtp
you describe what your product does, not what the problem is
girvo
Personal finance software isn't smart enough, and I'm lazy. I'm helping computers learn your spending habits, to save you money, pay off debts, and go on that holiday you want -- with as little effort from you as possible.
pldrnt
I LOVE this question (and it's the first thing I usually ask to myself and to others) so:

- Study scientific papers by deconstructing them through a wiki-like interface.

- Filtering news feeds, automatically removing stories and tweets I don't care about.

- Keeping an updated journal for each of my projects in the fastest and least intrusive way.

- Learning languages by cutting and pasting single expressions from podcasts into a personal audio library.

- Aggregating my soundcloud, beatport, bandcamp, youtube and shoutcast 'likes' into a single cloud playlist.

nkvoll
Starting an Elasticsearch server is easy. Maintaining and scaling a production cluster is hard, but not optional. http://www.found.no/
PabloOsinaga
Average amateur musicians love to make music with other people, but it is really hard to do as the whole thing involves getting together physically, practicing a lot to be decent together as a band, etc

While there has been quite a few attempts at online music collaboration, clearly the average amateur musician is not using any of them.

PROs use pro-music software to collaborate with other people, and some tech-oriented amateurs hang out in collaboration forums.

But all that is too hard/annoying for the average amateur musician.

BandHub "The Internet Music Studio" - makes it easy to make music with other people over the Internet.

http://getbandhub.com

reddiric
How does it handle latency?
PabloOsinaga
It's not real time. It's based on overdubs - i.e., you record tracks over previously recorded tracks. You can even start with any YouTube video as a base (e.g., original song you are covering, click track, karaoke type youtube video, or a dude playing guitar+singing that you want to add bass too).
utkarsh_apoorva
There seems to be a problem in streaming. I have a 16MBPS connection but the files needed to stream every second, freezing the audio and video.
fookyong
Create content for your social media accounts in just a few clicks. Because creating content is time-consuming but we all need to do it!

http://beatrixapp.com

mikemikemike
This is exactly the kind of idea that I want to have.
girvo
Oh wow. That's awesome. Forwarding to my Mum for her new business...
AznHisoka
Isn't this curating content, not creating content since it's already been created from someone else? Subtle but huge difference, as most people won't view you as a thought leader if all you're doing is curating.
fookyong
Depends on your definition of "create", but Beatrix also creates :) It's not just about link sharing - sign up and choose (for example) the Technology category and you'll see original pieces of content as well as link sharing in your content feed.
waps
Given that rewriting a text using AI is not that hard, I wonder. At what point does it stop being copying and start being creating ?

I sort of wonder about stuff like that. If you look at what we know about the algorithm that "is" the human mind, it's not actually capable of creating. So nothing is created. It's copies of other things, usually mixed together.

Most commercial AI products these days avoid patent issues by using AI. Every AI program that isolates and OCR's text uses dozens of patent pending techniques. It's just that this is not visible in the actual code. The reason that it's not in there is that that code encodes something akin to a VM, and the real program is the training results. It is generally very hard to determine what exactly the program does, but for trivial patents that (e.g. energy-lines to separate individual letters, or tracing likely pen movements and recognizing the derivative) is something these algorithms can be shown to do. Yet as far as I know, no-one's been successfully sued.

The algorithms themselves have the advantage that most are quite old, and have obvious roots in the 60s and 70s. So they are not patented in the US (effectively). Is this the perfect way around software patents ?

I wonder. Copyright-wise. If I use an algorithm analyse all text from an author and then have it produce "his next book", would that be legal ?