Ask HN: What do you wish existed? (October 2025)
What software or hardware product do you wish existed that you are ready to use right now? How much would you pay? Any existing thing you wish worked differently?
What software or hardware product do you wish existed that you are ready to use right now? How much would you pay? Any existing thing you wish worked differently?
A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.
I thought the benefit of using a CPA is then it's on them to rectify any errors?
But who exactly is going to catch those errors, especially when the outcome of such mistake would be an adjustment in your favor? Not the tax authorities, not the CPA. You’re left to advocate for yourself.
This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).
Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.
It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.
There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.
For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.
I wish America wouldn't tax their citizens abroad. They are one of only two countries in the world that do this. Eritrea is the other one.
Citizenship-based taxation makes absolutely no sense, other than to harass Americans living elsewhere. Every other country in the world does residency-based taxation.
A city map for cyclists that is updated and reviewed by other cyclists. How to get from A to B in a given city, the safest way possible, but with maps that can be edited like a wiki.
CityMapper is pretty good but there’s no way for me to correct a route because one stretch of it is actually a death trap that no one should bike on.
A distribution of the Genode OS that was usable as a daily driver.
A working realization of Memex, 80 years late in coming
I'd love to rent time on one of the machines AtomicSemi is building, I've got a chip I'd like to make, the BitGrid
Documentation for Free Pascal/Lazarus that was useable, alternatively a framework that replaces their existing documentation so that you could DIY parts of it without their weird build system.
Home use robot weed killer / puller. Does not need to be fast, but does should not need manual moving for each square foot. Although, if it was fast, I could drive it like a lawn mower speed that (even as slow as 1/4 pace) would be acceptable.
A great dinosaur museum in my home town.
A good print magazine on fashion and music.
Good looking sneaker which are 100% renewable.
A way to configure my local print newspaper to have only the things i am interested in making it 50% lighter.
I want a browser extension that is effectively a spam filter for ai content on reddit or similar. Same to filter out spam reviews
Or an app that just retrieved the content for groups I'm in on Facebook not what some algorithm thinks i want
On Facebook, if you use a web browser you can us this URL to see your friends posts in reverse chronological order, but there will still be ads. So that gets you 1/2 way there
https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
True wireless earbuds with case also having bluetooth speaker, mic and clip to attach it on T-shirt.
Foldable E-ink tablet that can also be used as monitor.
Up to date information on Android/iOS alternative phones with a path to purchase. I want to know what the web browser experience is like, eSIM support for data, and Android app emulation performance. Most online information is from like 2020
Unfortunately, most of the phones you describe are also from 2020.
Do we expect Android app emulation to continue being feasible moving into 2027? It seems unlikely to me, so I don't know if these alternatives will take off.
A robot that folds laundry.
Check this out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOoRnv3lA0k&t=1s
Tastedive for technology-adjacent blog posts.
a better dating app. a better job matching service.
for a second, I read this as "a better dang app" and thought, "dang is an app?"
>"dang is an app?"
I guess the cat is out of the bag.
Here's a little snippet I was sent back when I ran a valleywide gossip group chat:
"dang had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me to his private channel and told me his secret: 'I am not dang' he typed into the IRC window. 'My name is... Microsoft Bob. I inherited this site from the previous dang, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real dang, either. His name was Bill. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Santa Cruz.' Then he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would fund a Series to the Dread Pirate Microsoft Bob. So we got off the Caltrain and into the Uber XL, we took on an entirely new entourage and he stayed on for awhile as chief mod, all the time calling me dang. Once the mods believed, he left the Uber and I have been dang ever since. Except, now that we're together, I shall retire and hand the name over to someone else. Is everything clear to you?"