Ask HN: Let's Revive PG's /ideas.html discussion

1/3) Auto repair / servicing. The internet has helped consumers in all kinds of markets - retail and travel, perhaps most obviously - compare equivalent goods to ensure they are getting a fair price and good service. I would love for this to be applied to car repair and servicing. I confess that I know next to nothing about cars - I just want my car to run, and when it need repairs or services, I want to know that I'm getting a fair price. As it stands I have no idea really.<p>There are two aspects to this problem: (i) the garage is both doctor and pharmacist - there is an incentive to take advantage of my lack of knowledge and propose unnecessary work; and (ii) I don't know whether, for the services and goods proposed as necessary (including labour), the price is fair.<p>I know this is stuff that I should probably know, but I feel like there is an opportunity for this all to be made better.

1) Job and apartment search -- or "matching." I know there are all kinds of places where you can look for a job or an apartment online. But the process <i>sucks</i>. There is a ton of information out there, most of which is irrelevant, and the tools for sifting through it are terrible (I'm looking at you, Craigslist). Even when you find a job or an apartment you want to contact someone about, it's a total crapshoot as to whether the person at the other end will get back to you, most likely because they <i>too</i> are being inundated with irrelevant information -- inquirers or applicants they're probably not interested in.<p>I can envision something that works more like a dating site solving these problems. Both parties put in descriptions of themselves and criteria for what they're looking for in a potential employer/landlord or employee/tenant. Then the site matches people based on these criteria and sends both parties a list of good potential matches. Et voila -- a much smaller, more relevant set of data for both parties.<p>I know there are sites that already do something like this in one domain or the other, but I haven't seen any that really do a good job. I also think there's huge potential for putting the two problems together, since people are often looking for both a new job and a new apartment at once, and they use similar criteria (e.g., location, proximity to XYZ, seeking someone who has or wants XYZ...) that are currently difficult to search by.<p>Edit: I see that "dating site" and "Craigslist competitor" are both on the original ideas.html. I see my idea as an instance of these.

8) Dating. I have been trying online dating for about 4 weeks now. I am damn near close giving up. The process is too damn painful and it nows seems it is much much much easier at a bar.<p>If anyone wants to take a crack at it, here what I would advise you build: A simple app that asks you your very very basic info (name, picture, age, location, add 20 word description of yourself). Then simply, simply, simply show me pictures of women. If I like a girl I click "like". If the girls Likes me as well, then we can email each other. I dont need to email her through on your app. You can use the craigslist email style.<p>That's it. Nothing else. No video chat, IM, levels of communication etc... I don't know about girls, but most guys will only talk to women they are attracted to, no personality match can do the trick if I do not like what I see.

Internship programs for high school students. I see many for college students, probably because they need it more, but few are targeted towards high school students. Rather than work at a lower-level job, they could enrich themselves in a co-op, both furthering their knowledge and developing industry connections (and possibly make money on the side).

3) Health. I'm working on a startup for the blind right now, made huge initial progress but now have not touched it for months :S

I will start it off...<p>2) I personally admire email campaign sites like campaignmonitor.com and mailchimp.com. They have created great businesses centered around a very simple product. It also has a wide enough audience and viral loop.

I have personally loved sites which have tried to utilize the "intelligence of masses" and wikipedia being the prime example of that. Similarly Hacker News, Reddit, StackOverflow and many others which excite me the most.<p>1) I think I'd love a much better way of finding homes/real-estate which can derive synergy from 3rd-party apps like Google Maps as well as bring about some kind of social features more in the line of commenting we see on HN.<p>2) Mentioned earlier.<p>3) I think one can see huge opportunities in B2B niches. There seems to be a great unfilled opportunity in bringing together the businesses. The thing is that most of these businesses don't understand anything about web or Google Adwords which they might use to better market their products. The idea is to make it extremely simple for them to find other businesses which might be willing to buy the products and services.

I would love to see a real estate search site that used what Latitude or Foursquare know about me to suggest houses/apartments.<p>I imagine a search service that tells you things "4 times a week, you check in at restaurants with 1 mile of this apartment" or "Buying this house will shave 8 miles off your commute."

Click : <a href="http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html</a>

Can't imagine the potential liability but crowd sourcing patient symtptoms for a diagnosis would be interesting.

A way to see a HN profile while staying on an item.<p>Elaborating:<p>A small popup can appear upon selecting someone's HN username on a thread to then show their profile information. Selection would involve holding the left mouse button down on the user name for more than 1.5 seconds, and then the popup would appear with bio, member since, and karma. When the mouse button is released, the popup disappears.<p>The profile page may need to be parsed to extract information before displaying. It could also be cached client side with HTML5.<p>As an extra nuance, if the mouse is moved away from the username, the left button can be released but the popup remains activated and a little 'close' is inserted (and the submission and comment links appear). This allows the user to click on any links in the popup, as well as the submission and comment links.<p>In effect, the popup operates much like on Twitter when the mouse is moved over a username in the timeline, but in a more controlled fashion where it doesn't appear automatically upon mouseover.

I really want a combination of Google docs + wiki for my online collaboration. Basically the ease of use and simultaneous editing of Google docs, plus a structured resource of a wiki where we can link to the other docs, not have to set the permissions of each page, etc.

I for one love niche businesses and think this post touches on a lot a small business areas/ideas that are oft-ignored in favor of flashier ideas.<p>When I look around my area I see lots of money being spent in a variety of areas that have not been innovated online at all.<p>1) Landscaper architects/garnders/etc. - Still a very old way of doing things. This easily could be brought online<p>2) People love their dogs and as a result, dog walkers, groomers, etc. have very thriving businesses<p>3) Coffee/morning commute - Some sort of app that ties both of these together. A great offline component.<p>4) Coupons - Groupon has proven that people want deals and that if you're able to remove the stigma around it, they'll buy it with tenacity. This could definitely be expanded upon.

3) Education 2) Groupon for live video education. Teacher offers to teach x at a certain time at a certain price per student, with a minimum number of students required. Interesting speakers could offer guest lectures to teachers at the classroom level.

Apartment search is very clearly a pain. In Amsterdam, people look on 4-5 different crappy websites to find a an apartment to rent. It's incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. I also hate to give a thousand euros (or more) as a fee to an agent just because they list a house. That's a classic example of information asymetry problem. Lowering the bar for homeowners to put an ad online and better matching owners-tenants would work wonders.

3) the business side of Healthcare. There are tons of sites for consumer information but very few about the Healthcare industry from the business perspective.

RFS 2: New Paths Through Product Space<p>Offline catalogues have/are being duplicated again and again online yet the Internet is capable of so much more than paper.