Brainstorm HN: Outlandish Startup Ideas Pool - <AUTHOR> Pitch totally unrealistic Startup ideas.<p>Why do this? Well think of it like a brute-force brainstorming method. Very low SNR but hopefully a few of these will inspire someone to come up with a realistic/sane/good idea. <comment><USER4> A Woot.com for travel Unlike other last min travel sites, this would offer just 1 product per day with 0 or 1 options Example: "2 nights at the Edgewater Seattle 6/1-6/3 for $179 total" OR "2 RT tix LAX<->Vegas + 2 nights at Bellagio for $379 total 6/1-6/3"

Just need to find some travel companies who are willing to work with you. They just need to agree to block off X number of rooms/flights for that date.

If the site picks up steam, maybe offer products for diff regions each day (west coast, east coast, midwest, south)

<comment><USER5> Groupon.com actually does this - not travel, but experiences/discounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kidnap vacations. The ultimate thrill ride. You pay them some amount of money and they will arrive at your home, blindfold you, put you on a plane, and then take it off once you are in the foreign country. Then you have to work out where you are and how to get back.

I believe the government has been doing this for a while now.

<comment><USER7> Can you give this as gift? You pick someone else to go on a "kidnap vacation" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hire a bunch of people to walk around large markets in other countries, such as India, with wireless webcams attached to their heads. Shoppers can then direct these people to various stands, barter, and purchase stuff through a web interface.

<comment><USER9> that doesn't really sound unrealistic though! :)

<comment><USER10> yeah, justininindia.tv?

<comment><USER11> Depending on what 'large markets in other countries' you're talking about, I see a few immediate problems: -monetizing: a lot of these people don't have the money for additional services like this. Additionally, they /know/ the markets well, they're their markets! It's home! -customer base: this is similar to monetizing. How many people are you going to reach that would actually want your service?

This is an interesting idea, but it seems like we're too far away from the potential userbase to make something that people would actually want.

Now, if you're actually in India, I apologize for the last critique, but my first two statements stand.

<comment><USER8> I meant out-door shopping markets, and the customers would most likely be people in wealthier nations purchasing the goods online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Go on a diet. 2\. Open [web|desktop] app. 3\. Select diet plan (atkins; south beach; XYZ etc). 4\. Select number of people in household. 5\. Select number of people on diet. 6\. Select dietary options (eg gluten-free). 7\. Select budget. 8\. Add credentials and payment details for preferred online grocery store. 9\. App notes diet plan and previous shopping activity to reduce duplication, finds recipes and extracts ingredients 10\. App creates shopping cart automagically based on the above (and probably more besides) and purchases. 11\. App records purchases.

I've wondered for the last 4 or 5 years since I have had this idea whether this would actually be something to pitch to the retailers rather than the consumers.

<comment><USER13> I pitched this idea to YC last year, basically.

Mine also had "GPS on phone to monitor person's level of physical activity to help tailor diet to their dietary needs"

We even worked on putting this together so that the algorithm could work automatically for a family who had different dietary requirements.

The problem we found is that it doesn't work for the consumer market. We focussed too much on the idea and not enough on consumer behaviour, which if we had done our market research would have shown this to be not so good an idea.

We found that the dietary consumer market is focussed on selling you early into things you wont use, because the people that generally need these products have low motivation.

Those people who buy dietary books, supplements, exercise equipment etc generally purchase them and might use them for a month or two before essentially "giving up" at best. That's why most businesses targetting that large market are focussed on getting your money early, because relying on longterm revenue is a bad idea.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig use a similar model, although the diet plans they use are actually loss leaders so they can sell you their other products, which is where they actually make their money. The diet plans in the long run is where people stop going, but they've already extracted value out of you by purchasing their material.

<comment><USER14> That makes sense. But it reminds me of search engines cluttering up their portals with ads, and having pay-for-ranking search results - which also made sense. That was the market before google. I don't know if an analogous change of market exists for diets.

<comment><USER13> Well the thing is that is one of the conclusions we came too after having built a prototype. I'm not a skinny guy (nor was my partner), we built the thing for personal use and after several months of use we had found that it was simply too much additional effort that a simple meal plan could accomplish on is own. There were several things we didn't account for in our initial design.

1) Battery life on the mobile phone... Keeping your GPS on during waking hours is a big drain in current generation phones

2) People sticking to the plan (ours was designed so that you could go "off plan" if you felt hungry and it would adapt) ... during early testing if you skipped things, it could go out of whack

3) Motivation, we let several people use it, not including ourselves (about 15 all up) and we monitored the use and we found that in almost all cases (except 1) that people just stopped using it after around a month, with it's novelty wearing off after about two weeks. That's when we started to look at how the business models of other Dietary businesses work.

Basically, it had little more than novelty value - a simple meal plan and exercise would have achieved the same result.

(On a personal note, I found it just as easy to ride my exercise bike while watching TV and eating smaller portions to keep losing weight, I just bought smaller plates and glasses to change my perspective of the amount of food I was eating.)

<comment><USER14> Please take this with a grain of salt, as a possible perspective (I don't know if it's helpful or not). Let me detail the roles in the analogy:

You made a search engine. You found you weren't making any money, so you studied how other search engines made money, and you found that they had ad and paid-position results. You didn't like that, so you didn't continue. Then google took the approach of trying to give people what they want (fast, uncluttered, relevant results), and then later (literally _years_ later) working out how to make money from it (this was a whole project in itself: text ads, relevant to search, priced by auction: adwords, seemingly "inspired" by goto/overture).

Your point 3 (motivation) seems to be the show-stopper. My suggestion is to consider if there is a way to solve this problem - not in order for you to make money, but in order to help people diet. Illustrative examples (recall that I don't actually know anything about it):

\- Make it continually novel, with new content being added all the time (like HN, or WoW), or the "achievement unlocked" of some games, or Nintendo games. Or a new diet every week. Or even as a platform with new perspectives on the diet coming out each week or day (like a daily horoscope or cartoon maybe?). Don't know if this would work, but the idea is to attack the problem of novelty wearing off.

\- Or expand on the solution you found in your personal note: tell people to buy smaller plates and glasses; and buy an exercise bike, with instructions about how to set it up with the TV. Maybe this seems trivial and obvious, but I'm guessing it wasn't the first thing you tried yourself - <USER2> encouragement and guidance would make a huge difference for some people.

Maybe it seems that you can't make money from this; but (I believe that) if a business finds a way to help people, it will find a way to make money. The thing that is potentially exciting is that maybe there is a fantastic way to be extremely helpful to people in dieting, that all the other businesses have missed, because they were focussed on the business model that worked - <USER3> of doing that, find a better way, like Google did.

It sounds like you've done a thorough and intelligent job (and also that you are sick to death of it), and that you were excited about your solution, not about the problem. Let me emphasise that I really have no idea if there exists such a solution as I'm outlining - I just wanted to communicate a focus on your customer's problem, not business models. Reading back that previous sentence, it sounds kind of rude to me, but I hope you'll understand how I mean it.

<comment><USER13> oh I understand what you're saying, the thing is we over-engineered a problem which has a pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise).

With our solution, we figured with the addition of the GPS, we could also do things like warn people if they went into the wrong place... eg walked into a mcdonalds, it not only could let them know that they shouldn't be there, but perhaps could provide them with alternatives close by, so instead of just a mealplanning solution but also a mentoring thing.

But in the end, it was just a novelty which wore off.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the quick reply. I see what you mean.

 _pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise)._ I agree, but it doesn't yet seem to be a solved problem for many people - in practice. Still, that's a different question

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the problem with diets and exercise is mostly a continuous motivational problem if anything I figure, which is why the current business models are set up the way they are.

People are really motivated for the first few days/weeks, after which their interest wanes it seems. That's why it's set up as a "pay early" type thing.

Honestly, I think something like the wii fit is a step in the right direction. Make it fun.

<comment><USER14> heh, wii fit seems to encompass novelty _like a nintendo game_ and exercise in front of a TV.

ah: wii fit for PC (but avoid patent infringement).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A search engine for your house. Tag every object that you care about with a tiny electronic label (could be an rfid chip). Some objects could come pre- tagged and added to your library the first time they cross your door.

When you can't find something, find the object on your computer and start walking around the house with a wand that beeps louder as you get closer to the object. Would also work when you lose something outdoors and you can more or less retrace your steps.

<comment><USER16> Alternatively, just sell matching pairs of electronic tags (sticky) that both have buttons and beep when the other one is pressed.

<comment><USER17> Yep. I'd be sticking them on my kids shoes

<comment><USER18> My girlfriend says she would stick them on her shoes too, and that's a lot of shoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Set up inexpensive wireless cameras pointed at all street parking spots in the city. (doesn't have to be wireless cameras - pick any method or device that can reliably detect whether a parking spot is empty, cameras are the most flexible). Feed that data to a server, then dish it out to mobile devices (iPhone, etc.) combined with GPS to find the nearest street parking spot. Bonus points for intelligent behavior like not sending two cars to the same spot, or considering which spots are likely to be filled by the time you get there and what other spots are around. Mad bonus points if you work at a high enough level that this feature gets built directly into new cars.

I guess "outlandish" is a bit strong, it feels like it's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER20> Set it so that you can book a parking space (for a fee) ahead of time while you're driving there.

Instead of wireless cameras, I thought of some sort of sensor(s) embedded in the ground that could detect something about it (by sight, magnet, etc). If they were embedded poles, they could raise up once the spot was booked to prevent it from being taken, until you arrived, entered your booking code and lowered the barriers.

I think a city might need to be designed in advance for something like this though!

<comment><USER14> Bonus: auction (a la adwords).

With video, you might not need to physically prevent park-theft - a hefty fine might be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wikiocracy: instead of electing legislators, you use a wiki environment to build a corpus of legislation and manage legal cases, with limited commit ability (eg no more than monthly or so...don't want to make long post). For a small fee, contracts can be registered and arbitrated like a private arbitration service, minus the expensive pay-to-play which usually decides on behalf of the larger entity.

It quietly supplants the the private and later the public legal system by providing a superior open source alternative.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm tired of sex shops that ship their products using discrete packaging. I want a store that ships products in packaging purposely designed to be as embarrassing as is plausibly possible.

Charge double what a normal sex store does, and even if you only get a few hundred orders a day via Google you still have a decent business.

<comment><USER23> > I'm tired of sex shops that ship their products using discrete packaging.

I agree. Down with discrete; we need continuous packaging.

<http://everything2.com/title/discreet%2520vs.%2520discrete>

<comment><USER24> Just speak German. We have the same distinction, but only one word for both meanings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 5 Star Jail Hotel (good for procrastinators).

Pay us and we will lock you up for as many days as you paid. You get one hour per day to hang out within our establishment. Breakfast, Lunch and Diner are eaten with other prisoners. The rest of time we will lock you up in your room (with internet connection). Phones lines are only open for x hours. Emails programs are blocked most of the time... You see where I am heading with this.

It could be good for someone with a deadline to accomplish something.

<comment><USER7> Can a boss send an employee to procrastinator jail to make sure they finish their task by deadline?

<comment><USER26> Can you send the boss so you can get on with work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I want to see a smart traffic control system.

Currently I'm only aware of the traffic lights which can sense when the car stopped next to the line and switch the lights accordingly.

I would like to see more. I would like the system to identify how dense the traffic is in all directions, including the right/left turn lines.

It would then adjust the duration of the green light according to the number of cars travelling in corresponding directions. It should also identify if all the cars that were waiting for the green light have crossed the intersection, and if there are no more cars it could turn then red light earlier.

So often I see the following: a jam is on a major road. A red line turns on, and a lonely car crosses a major road. The light is still red though for some time, with dozens of cars waiting for nothing ...

<comment><USER28> It's called a roundabout. ;-) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout> They help traffic flow lots in the UK and elsewhere around the world. Not a panacea though.

<comment><USER29> I've never seen a roundabout work well with high traffic though (in the US anyway), it has always seemed to me that they work amazingly well with low and medium traffic, but once they are full you end up with a single inbound street hogging it since everyone else has to yield.

<comment><USER28> Everyone else would have to yield only if all traffic entering from that single busy inbound road was going all the way around the roundabout and exited onto the road it entered from. Since few cars do this, the odd single car on other entrances gets a gap where they pull out, often causing the busy road to queue while they pass, which in turn lets others out, etc.

I agree though, the heavier the traffic the less they work. Especially when morons pull out onto it despite seeing the exit is jammed and without leaving room for other lanes to cross in front and behind of them. Also, in the UK, many drivers fail to signal correctly, giving less clues to other drivers as to when they can pull out, e.g. if you're not signalling left as you exit a roundabout, you're doing it wrong! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The next big user interface: your car windshield. The windshield communicates with billboards that look empty from outside your car to beam images appropriate for your consumer tastes and demographic. In addition you will be able to interact with various mediums: webmail, ipod, video conferencing etc when your car is fully stopped. It goes on from there.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A DBUS like system for the internet (for message passing and multi casting events to registered handlers). It's like twitter, except for application to application/people communication.

You first visit the site and create a data structure and register it at the X service website. Then a application can send messages in that data structure to the X service. Other services/applications/websites/people can register (like following on twitter) various handlers on the X service. Any time the main application publishes a event to the X service, it's pushed out to all the listening handlers...

I guess when I write it down, doesn't so outlandish. Anyway, up for grabs.

<comment><USER18> I would use it. Can you also include a cross-browser javascript library to listen for these events? Push over http sucks and this could fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have three great ideas for startups that fit this request.

1.) scambledporn.com - If you can remember tv before it went digital, porn used to be scambled by varying the horizontal sync of the tv signal for that channel. This made it unwatchable, unless you were really really patience. My idea is to create a website that has porn that works on the same concept; it would be scrambled until people pay to have it unscrambled. The more you pay the more unscambled it would be.

2.) Fire Energy Convertor (FEC) these are self contained devices that can be dropped into wildfires. Once placed into the fire; the device would convert the heat of the fire into electricity. After the fire subsided, the device would be placed into a grid that would provide electricity. Let's stop wasting all the energy that is release by forest fires. Eventually the device (FEC 2.0) could be placed into active volcano as well.

3.) An exercise device that can be used while you shower. It would be like killing two birds with one stone. People wouldn't have to worry about having to take a shower after working out, because they would already be in the shower and can soap up when done. The marketing plan for this device is a 30 minute infomercial that walks people through its use, with several nice looking and in good shape people. When you purchased the device, you will also receive a instructional video of your choosing (Male, Female).

<comment><USER32> You actually just gave me a great idea...CPA porn. Complete CPA offers, get access to porn. Perfect, because that way no credit card is involved...

<comment><USER33> Why not extend it into a Cory Doctorow Woofie system?

I do a favor for you, woofies.com gives me a couple woofie points, which I may redeem for pron. My favor backfires (buggy code, typos, etc) and my woofie karma suffers and I must suffer pron of worse quality.

Viva la Bitchun society irl!

Note that this is completely unrealistic because no one pays for pron anymore anyway.

<comment><USER13> _Note that this is completely unrealistic because no one pays for pron anymore anyway._

You would be surprised. If the following device does half of what is promised and recent sales of a device called a "monkey spanker" (I helped a female friend of mine set up an online sex store/blog a few months ago) are anything to go by, I think the future of pay for porn is very bright indeed.

[http://gizmodo.com/5129520/realtouch-teledildonics-as- design...](http://gizmodo.com/5129520/realtouch-teledildonics-as-designed-by- former-nasa-engineer-nsfw)

Those guys are going to make a killing if it works as intended...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Device where every time you mutter a complaint it records it and attempts to match it up and send it to the correct recipient. The complaints are anonymous, but tracks whether the complaint was responded to or not. If so, the complainer gets more karma and is prioritized higher. There could be the opposite marking of spam or unreasonable. The eventual goal is to identify complainer pundit wizards that will make the world better by walking around and muttering (bitching) about their dislikes.

<comment><USER24> You should include praise as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Build an iphone app to alleviate OCD:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601648>

In particular, such an app would help alleviate problems with repeated checking. The user would use the app to take a photo/video of something instead of checking it repeatedly (e.g., you locking the front door).

The photo/video would be tagged with the time and place.

To actually try to cure OCD, one might introduce a probability that the photo/video will not be taken. One can have this probability increase over time as the user's condition improves.

Another possibility is to delete the photo/video automatically after some time interval, which decreases as the user's condition improves.

This is something that I might actually consider building if there is sufficient demand.

<comment><USER36> What happens if someone's OCD ends up turning into taking pictures to make sure that they did something?

<comment><USER35> It's better than having continuous anxiety or returning to your house to check whether the door is locked for example.

<comment><USER37> as an every-guy, who only at various times has "suffered" mild OCD fits: I can see the value to be had by the clinically compulsive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will start:

* Online Grocery shopping with Automated reordering. The service provides a small RFID scanner for the trash can, and all items are tagged with a RFID. Anytime it's thrown away, the items are reordered (such as milk/eggs/drinks). Would work with your local grocery shop.

* A everything recommendations system (such as Amazon's _you might also like_ ) except spans all things (not just things to buy, but also places to go visit, people, idealogies, match making, hobbies, cars, music, etc). Data sources would include websites you buy stuff, social networks, your bank information, gps info, phone calls, browsing methods, your private data, your photos, music, everything. (heh, privacy nightmare).

<comment><USER38> This for washing clothes would be good. Put a reader in the hamper and track all dirty clothes going into it. Notify me when there is enough similarly coloured stuff there to do a wash, or when I'm running out of clean necessary items. Also, tell me to start washing stuff in advance of long trips away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> A junk gym, wherein all equipment would be gathered from a large junkyard, and could be housed within a cheap warehouse. Bench press could be a small bench with perhaps an axle and two tires on each side, or metal plates, all with weights marked. Various other car parts could be transformed into different exercise machines. Dumbbells would be various pieces of metal with marked weights.

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes for quite the manly place to work out. I mean think about the costs here (no need for expensive equipment either, their junk!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Create an online AJAX IDE for developing flash using the haXe language. It would be compiled and put together on the server, but the client would be open source and free as a desktop app too, by the magic of haXe. Services could include webhosting and automatic upload of your app, as well as stock flash animation media and sounds.

</comment><comment><USER41> An online wargame in reality using geolocation and mobile phones.

Build game servers that serve as wireless mesh network and locate them throughout the city(Partnering with local businesses such as coffee shops). They can also store the company's weapon hardwares and suits to loan to player.

Players can also build their own weapon system and suits.

</comment><comment><USER42> Cars that drive without a human at the wheel. This is the norm for sci-fi movies, and we still don't have it.

<comment><USER43> We do: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_(vehicle)>

<comment><USER18> But I can't buy one. A startup that solved this problem would have to solve a lot of legal issues as well as technical ones.

Also Stanley can't drive in traffic. What I really want is something that can commute for me from San Francisco to Silicon Valley while I play video games.

<comment><USER44> We have that too: <http://www.bart.gov/>

<comment><USER18> Bart doesn't go to Silicon Valley, just to Millbrae. Even in SF Bart only goes through the Mission and downtown. If you don't live and work near Caltrain then public transportation between SF & the south bay is more or less not an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A pen-sized device which gives you cleaning advice. It has various chemical sensors built in to the tip and then displays a readout of what cleaning product to use.

</comment><comment><USER6> Since the newspapers are about to die, we need something to replace the government/corporate watchdog function of journalism. (sensational news, sports, classifieds, entertainment, and celebritard news have already migrated elsewhere, so let's not consider them.)

Some form of hyper-customizable newsletter service, providing updates on upcoming legislation or business deals. There are large firms who already subscribe to such things in the form of clipping services; this goes one level deeper.

The target market should be small business owners and people who have some interest in local politics.

<comment><USER45> _replace the government/corporate watchdog function of journalism_

I think you misspelled lapdog

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> A digg-style grocery store, where customers can vote online for new products.

<comment><USER47> Just to play devil's advocate, how much more information would this offer over purchase data?

<comment><USER46> The idea is to find out what people want ahead of time, rather than buying a bunch of product only to find out that nobody wants it.

Of course, just because people vote for something doesn't mean they'll actually go to the store and pick it up.

<comment><USER47> Oh, I thought you were talking about something for consumers to get new product recommendations, rather than something to help the supermarkets target their inventory.

So...how often do people know new products exist, let alone whether they want them, if the supermarket isn't already selling them?

Not trying to shoot you down, I think it's an interesting idea, just trying to make sure I understand it.

<comment><USER46> One possibility: The grocery store seeds the site with product data from their suppliers, and customers vote up what they want to see on the shelves.

New product lines could be "featured" weekly, and the ones that pass a certain vote threshold get ordered. If a product you voted for gets added, perhaps you get an email with a coupon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> An engine that scans forum posts for factors like "emoticon content", builds a network of who replies to whom, and uses that information to establish a hierarchy of social status among the participants.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A startup factory. A collection of hackers, marketing people, business minded people, and their product is making startups. The basic infrastructure very very fast. Then selling them out.

<comment><USER23> That's an incubator. Been done.

<comment><AUTHOR> The current sense of Incubators are a bit different, they look for groups with ideas, take them under their wing for a fraction of stakes, and let them go. The ideas always come from the outside.

What I am saying is, even the ideas are brainstormed inside. Imagine 100 great minded people every month sitting down and choosing a good idea (that originated from the inside), and all of them putting their efforts in to implementing it. You do that every month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A online grocery store comparison shopping. Data is customer driven and pulled from the weekly shopper. Reciepts can be scanned in and processed to keep track of shopping. Shopping lists can be entered online to be cross checked against the closest grocery stores (you get to decide if going to 2 stores is worth saving $10 extra) and sent to your phone. Online grocers(amazon) even get in the mix to provide deals and free shipping. And why stop there, why not alcohol too...

<comment><USER50> Shameless plug that you (being, presumably, a kiwi based on your grabaseat comment earlier) may find interesting: www.boozr.co.nz

I've decided to start with alcohol and work my way backwards towards groceries, but the idea is roughly the same as what you've outlined. :) Luckily here in NZ everyone except Foodstuffs (NW, Pak'n'save, Four Square) is online so getting the prices isn't too tricky...

<comment><USER49> Actually I just lived there for a half a year, but miss NZ and the special brand of beer there dearly.

I like app, only we always bought our beer/wine from the grocery stores. But for any liquor this looks sweet as.

What did you write it in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Train chimps to break CAPTCHAs. My guess is that it's feasible. E.g, see <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTgeLEWr614>

It is, however, unethical, and isn't something that benefits society, despite the fact that a viable business model might exist in the short term.

Note that this would give a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Captcha farm' :-)

<comment><USER52> Chimps are way too expensive

<comment><USER24> Use ravens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A twitter clone that requires you to pass a spelling and grammar check and use _more_ than 140 characters

<comment><USER53> Maybe check posts using <http://stupidfilter.org/main/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Nuclear powered laptop never needs recharging

<comment><USER15> Fat-powered laptop (iphone, etc) plugs into your stomach and makes you lose weight.

<comment><USER55> A screen-less laptop that projects images into the mind so as not to make us all blind

That rhymed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Think pmsbuddy.com meets Babelfish meets the Mechanical Turk.

The idea is simple: submit transcripts of your conversations with your wife to the site, and women will translate for you.

"she said "fine." She really means she is pissed off."

For a fee, the site may also offer real-time chats for those situations where you need to figure out what a woman is thinking NOW.

<comment><USER40> We have that already: <http://www.fmylife.com/>

;)

<comment><USER33> "Today, while powerwashing my deck, a bee flew and landed on my leg. Thinking I'll just wash it away before it stings me, I aimed the powerwasher nozzle at the bee. A bee sting isn't nearly as painful as powerwashing your leg. FML" <http://www.fmylife.com/work/1818559>

Ok, new idea. Mix this with the idea for an OCD iphone app, and you get a Mechanical Turk capable of giving SMS advice in real time to potential Darwin Award winners.

"should i try to skateboard off my roof?" "62% say no."

This would also work as I originally imagined it.

"I just got a kevlar vest on eBay and I told my wife I was planning on fighting crime. She said 'whatever makes you happy'" "She meant she's planning on collecting your life insurance."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A washer/dryer combo that works as a single unit, so that you don't have to move things manually from one to the other.

I see it as a 2 story contraption, washer on top, dryer on the bottom. After the washer is done, a trap door opens and the clothes fall into the dryer, which then auto-starts.

As you can guess, I was doing laundry recently

<comment><USER21> Already exists. These are the norm in Europe, I have no idea why they're not popular in the US. We Europeans enjoy mocking antiquated American home appliances and can't believe you still use stovetop kettles and blenders from the 1950s. [http://www.gelighting.com/apo/products/appliances/clothes_ca...](http://www.gelighting.com/apo/products/appliances/clothes_care/02.htm)

It looks like a regular washing machine, you just put your clothes in the front, set the buttons, and 2 hours later they're clean and dry. It's awesome.

<comment><USER42> What kind of kettles and blenders do you guys use in Europe? I want in :(

<comment><USER24> Stuff like <http://images.google.de/images?q=wasserkocher> is common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A compartment inside a car's engine to keep food warm while travelling.

<comment><USER57> Like the glove compartment? At least on some cars it is very warm in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Gentlemen, I refer you to the ineffable Halfbakery for a more complete list: <http://www.halfbakery.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Kindle-ize all your books (in a DRM-free form, guaranteed accessible for 25 years). I want a service which is both legal and easy to use. Don't make me sit there and laboriously use some CueCat thing and make a huge bibliography.

If this means that someone has to cart them away and destroy them, I don't really care; actually it's kind of a benefit if you live in a small apartment. Most of them are not remarkable as far as physical form goes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is for advertising: Have devices in public places where people are likely to sit down (bus steats, benches in Airports, bus stops) that listen in and automatically pick out keywords from conversations. Ads are displayed directly in front that is relevant to the conversation.

<comment><USER59> Hahaha that's just crazy enough to get loads of funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> A music service that actually reflected the reality of today's tech: ubiquitous access to all the music ever made. My iphone should be able to store or stream anything. I should be able to send anything I'm listening to to a friend.

Bullshit about limits on the number of computers connected to my iphone, illegal file sharing, DRM, $1 for a download that has $0 marginal cost, etc. -- all of it out the window.

Give creators tools to directly engage with their audience, make all their content free and easy to consumer & share, and make money from live shows, special physical goods, and patronage.

</comment><comment><USER6> Rental for moving boxes.

Whenever I move, which is fairly frequently, I have to make some trip somewhere just to get boxes. Then there's the effort of breaking them down and then either storing them or throwing them away.

How about some boxes which are just a little bit sturdier than normal, which could be rented? They are delivered to your home and then picked up again (perhaps part of the moving service) and reused for other customers.

<comment><USER17> We've moved a number of times, and always bought 2nd hand boxes and then sold them again when done. No middle man, no hassles if boxes get destroyed or you want to keep them, and comes out net cost of $0 (2nd hand boxes have a constant value)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Form a consortium that aims to get drugs decriminalized as long as the government approves certain suppliers, and get them to write the law such that your clients are the likely beneficiary. This is worth _billions_ in investment. Target an American state which seems to be on the tipping point and you could be very rich.

Except for the fact that existing drug cartels would kill you before you could succeed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Car Net.

A information network between vehicles that share information about what their destinations and routes are. Specially for congested areas, they would all work together to find the optimal route with the least congestion.

Instead of everyone trying to take the shortest path, all the vehicles will work together to figure out the shortest-time-path based by distributing the road load levels evenly.

</comment><comment><USER61> Similar to kidnap vacations: larger scale version of JeJune Institute. It's in downtown SF, and is a physically immersive alternate reality game. It's based on cults that have committed mass suicide.

So, along those lines, rent a large building and turn it into a hub of some wild new ARG, with scavenger hunt aspects, physical world puzzles, and community activities.

</comment><comment><USER62> Twitter for all things non-human. Like my coffee machine tweeting me that the pot's empty or the new brew's ready.

<comment><USER63> Thinkgeek already sells some device that lets your plants tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> An alternative internet for file-sharers, using line-of-sight radio communications and other methods. There are enough people in many urban areas to make this work.

Perhaps implausible since you can already do most of that with VPNs on the regular internet, and hardware is expensive and obvious.

</comment><comment><USER64> Movie Software that provides stock footage of fixed sets (homes, gardens, etc) and places you in those settings perfectly. Also same with cars and so on - the software should be at a level where you could make a full movie without ever leaving your home.

<comment><USER23> _you could make a full movie without ever leaving your home._

That is approximately the most depressing idea ever.

<comment><USER44> Alternatively, very very useful. (I had this idea years ago, in a simpler form.) Imagine it more as a storyboarding utility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Any "serious" web programmers looking for new web startup ideas, contact me at email@example.com

This is more than just the idea and includes some proprietary assets.

Please only those who are "serious" or serial entrepreneurs respond, preferably with a Bio.

</comment><comment><USER66> In an experiment, formed a line in front of a random doorway. After a whole, the line grew. Nobody knew what they were waiting for.

What about hiring people to make a store front of parking lot or booth look busy?

</comment><comment><USER67> This just reminds me of the Half Bakery, it's also got a whole ton of crazy, outlandish, unrealistic ideas that won't work. Otherwise known as brainstorming, yes?

www.halfbakery.com

</comment><comment><USER21> A small game programming library/module which just exports your score, and allows you to see your rate of progress in different games over time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Video Twitter. Post updates of 10 seconds or less. I have a feeling people are already working on this, though.

<comment><USER68> <http://12seconds.tv>

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> An alarm clock with a numeric keypad so I don't have to sit there mashing the "down" button.

</comment><comment><USER70> every day one person dies in a high speed chase. street spikes work if you can get them down and back up again before the chase car runs over them. there must be a way to shut a car down by addressing its computer system with rfid or something.

<comment><USER21> EMP guns FTW - [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jul/12/sciencenews.cr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jul/12/sciencenews.crime) Bonus: they scare luddites, who are convinced these are used all the time to kill people the Illuminati hate by making them fly in a small plane during bad weather first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> A chip that implants inside your brain so that you can surf the web with sheer thought.

</comment><comment><USER72> RentADesignatedDriver.com

<comment><USER73> I believe these are called Taxis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Patented training method for teaching pets to do house work.

</comment><comment><USER75> develop a crossplatform webinterface to read any and every format of text conceivable in its most CONVENIENT form possible.

<comment><USER76> Sort of like Readability by Arc90?

<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Glasses that make everyone look attractive.

<comment><USER77> Glasses filled with beer seem to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Plastic bags that are not a pain to open.

<comment><USER78> Or those hard plastic cases that don't involve cutting with scissors or a knife and possibly slicing off a finger.

<comment><USER79> That's called cardboard.

<comment><USER19> So, what we want is transparent cardboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> A law firm connected to a school where the lawyers make $30/hour and the teachers make $200/hour. ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: Career advice services? - <AUTHOR> Landing a new job is a multi-step process, where you need to be good in most of these steps to be successful. You start from the CV, then the first calls, technical interview, negotiation, etc. In my case, the initial response rate to my applications is very low, but, once I get to the interviews, I usually get an offer. This makes me think I need to improve or drastically change my CV to increase the number of opportunities. I started to look around for career counsellors and CV review services, and the offer is huge...<p>Did anyone try any of these services? It's worth to invest in it? Any feedback is appreciated! <comment><USER2> I run a professional services business in Shanghai China, think English resumes, LinkedIn Profile editing, interview coaching for global job seekers. Most service providers balk at the career counseling part because they can't charge an appropriate amount for their time. On the other hand, most job seekers don't want to pay for review as once they get professional comments back, they have to revise and don't know how good their edits were. That is unless they arrange for multiple rounds of comment and editing which is unlikely. From my experience over 3 years ownership and previously 24 years in finance in the US, most people either wing it or pay for full edits.

HTH...

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had agencies provide invaluable advice on CV layout and content.

<comment><AUTHOR> any agencies to suggest?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your opinion on "Launch: Silicon Valley?" - <AUTHOR>

I got an email recommending I submit an application to "Launch: Silicon Valley" and since I'm not familiar with that event, I wanted to see what the HN community thinks about it.
Are you familiar with it? Is it something worth applying to?
I'm coming here for guidance since a Google search about the event mostly turns up their own website and calls-for-submissions by them, and not much in terms of third-party reviews of past events. <comment><USER2> I've never been myself, but a lot of the organizations involved in the panels are pretty credible (SVASE, Garage Technology). A trusted co-worker of mine has worked with them with good results and recommended that our clients apply too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Clinical Trial Rule Is Widely Ignored - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/health/08aware.html

<comment><USER2> For the government's information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint. Which this sure sounds like. ("Many researchers are ignoring a 2005 requirement that they register proposed clinical trials in a government database as a condition for publishing their results in medical journals.")

<comment><AUTHOR> If the researchers accept government funds, they should accept government conditions on how they make results available to other researchers. Freedom of speech (the body of law connected to prior restraint) is freedom to do what you want with a printing press you own and pay for. If someone else owns and pays for the printing press, you honor the owner's freedom of speech by printing what the owner says, or you go buy your own printing press.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the Constitution says nothing about who owns and pays for the press.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Migraine prophylaxis? - <AUTHOR> Did you find your migraine trigger? Do you have some prophylaxis which works for you? <comment><USER2> Triggers for me are poor/insufficient sleep, stress, and large upwards or downwards changes in my caffeine intake.

Regular exercise seems to have dramatically reduced the severity of my migraines. Frequency seems to be decreasing too, as I am getting better at controlling my triggers.

I don't like taking triptans, they seem to give me a nasty hangover that almost as bad as just waiting the the migraine out, but it's hard to disentangle the migraine and drug after-effects.

Mostly, I follow my doctors advice and take the maximum safe dose of Ibuprofen as early as possible when I notice onset symptoms. Sometimes I use diclofenac instead. Check with a pharmacist, but if you can safely take paracetamol, you can combine paracetamol with ibuprofen or diclofenac.

I don't bother with over-the-counter medications that include some codeine - the codeine is not sufficient to do anything useful, and the dosage of whatever they are mixed with is often weird.

</comment><comment><USER3> My migraines have mostly gone away now that I exercise regularly. For me it was cardiovascular. I'd see an aura and I'd get ready for the pain when I was a kid. Later in life I discovered that taking a simple Advil as soon as I saw the migraine would head it off. When I was a kid chocolate covered almonds and OJ would almost always hit me with a migraine. I discovered this by keeping a journal of what I ate. Changes in weather could bring them on too, especially if I was exercising hard right as the weather was changing. Bright screens in dark rooms could take a "maybe migraine" and turn it on. I've also found that if I wake up with a migraine that cannabis and Advil will put me to sleep pretty quick, though I decided not to use cannabis anymore because it makes me feel dumb for days and I was never a huge fan anyway.

<comment><USER4> I used to suffer from painful and paralyzing migraines, especially when sunny days took over bad weather. I don't have any anymore.

A few years ago, I decided to carry Ibuprofen wherever I'd go and take 400 mg as soon as I felt it would come.

Doing this for a duration of 6 months made them become less and less frequent.

My father who was also suffering migraines told me he had met a doctor that gave him the same advice but with a more powerful medication (Naproxen) with the same outcome.

And I still eat a lot of chocolate and almonds. ;)

This trick saved my life, really.

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear. When I was a kid the doc prescribed T3s since normal Tylenol wasn't working. I wish we would have tried other fixes first because T3s barely helped. They would just make me high and didn't solve the underlying problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a background. I am nearly 40, 70 kg, 176m, pretty active person but not doing very regular sport. I had migraine starting at the age of 10 or 12.

The best ways, for me, not to trigger a migraine are:

\- very good sleep. It means taking a 25 minutes nap during the day if I feel tired.

\- very good hydration. I drink about 1.5L in the morning and just a single cup of coffee.

\- low stress. The lower the better because stress reduces the quality of my sleep.

\- if it starts, I try to stop the migraine as early as possible with directly 1g Aspirine. This is my way but here you need to ask your M.D. because of course I cannot tell you what you should take as medication!

I was only able to achieve this as I started working from home (for the nap if tired).

Sorry for the throwaway account. I am traveling, but if you have questions, just ask and I will answer here.

Edit: from the other comments we all follow more or less the same method.

</comment><comment><USER6> Exercising 45 minutes a day, 7 days a week, reduced my migraines to near zero after close to 20 years of suffering. I would recommend carefully tracking them with a diary. (I used a separate calendar in my phone.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have many triggers. Some foods (probably histamine/tyramine sensitivity), smells, and weather. After a few years they became chronic and almost always had a migraine.

A combination of Zonegran, Botox every 12 weeks, and sphenopalatine ganglion nerve blocks and naproxen for acute migraine have them under control now. Topirimate negatively impacted my language skills and memory, but Zonegran is more tolerable and effective. SPG has a long history for TMJ and facial pain, and the Allevio and Sphenocath devices make the procedure easy. Other nerve blocks and Cephaly have been helpful in reducing the severity of the pain. A lower carbohydrate diet has also helped.

Vaping medical CBD has aborted a migraine immediately multiples times, but is not available where I live yet.

There are new CGRP blocking drugs that are supposed to be on the market soon. Aimovig is the first, and it's a preventative.

My doctor actually wrote an app to help people track their headaches: [http://www.iheadache.com/](http://www.iheadache.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Dehydration, really fatty and dense foods, bright screens in dark rooms, and lack of sleep are my triggers. I find aspirin and sipping on water for a while will make the pain subside somewhat, and then a nap will clear it away.

I'm not sure if this is really the case physically, but I treat it as if there's a buildup of metabolites in my brain, and that is pretty effective at removing the problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> Quick temperature changes. Bright light. Weather changes. Wearing something tight-fitting on the head. Large changes in stress level. Caffeine withdrawal is a big one. Getting 10 hours of sleep (first night) then 5-6 hours of sleep (second night) is a common cause for me.

I think the #1 underlying cause for me has been not getting enough hydration (or having electrolyte imbalances), though. As I've upped my daily fluid intake, they are occurring less often in general.

Though, it's changed over time. At one point my most common trigger was stress. Since I've changed jobs, that also has helped reduce the frequency, very noticeably (was getting multiple a week at a stressful/hated job)

It's odd because different days, different pain meds seem to work better. Aleve/Naproxen has the best overall efficacy for me, though. That, and/or putting something cold on my face and neck and being in a darker room.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know what triggers my monthly migraine but I have found that Citrulline malate (an extract of watermelon) a vascular dilator prevents it for me 100%. Originally I had started taking it for sport reasons but subsequently found it fixes the migraine! Must be that my migraine is due to vascular constriction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else get migraines from... relaxing? Like having a few weeks of from work? Like I can wake up and after having enjoyed a full night of sleep and a steady breakfast and have the aura break out one hour after waking up. Christmas, easter, long weekends etc are times when I expect them to arrive.

As a child and young adult I just came to the conclusion that I got em when they felt on arriving.... They were much more frequent then but less intense.

I also guess stress is a trigger for me since I usually have multiple episodes around the day my father passed but that is the only stress I can remember being a trigger. (This has only been the case since he passed. Can't remember being triggered by stress before either.)

Edit: Does anybody else not really get "regular" headaches, like at all?

<comment><USER12> My mother experiences migraines most frequently on weekends when she does not work, she has a stressful job. I have always thought of it as a "post-stress" collapse.

<comment><USER11> That sucks! Like I've always said to people I need to have something to think about or do or else I might get a migraine... I do a lot of crosswords in the summer...

I don't feel that stressed at all actually. I guess I could sleep more during the weekdays. I clock about 5-6 but I guess that's normal? 3-4 makes me feel kinda hyped which is weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I usually have strong auras and medium pain, and it can take between weeks and months between attacks, though recently I had an attack two days in a row and I felt like I had aura-like issues with my vision for weeks. Not a fun time.

Most of my experience is typical and mirrors things already mentioned in this thread:

Triggers are a combination of stress, lack of sleep, strong light (particularly sunlight), and sudden increase in coffeine intake (people have mentioned a change both ways, and I'll have to pay attention if that's the case). Possibly red wine and nuts, but I don't think they're big factors.

Regular exercise seems to decrease the frequency, and 400mg of Ibuprofen taken once I notice the aura helps the pain.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm glad insofar as I've been experiencing them less and less as I get older. They were worst as a child and in puberty, bad during studying and kinda ok now.

They're too rare to pinpoint a real trigger, but maybe it's indeed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind#In_popular_culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind#In_popular_culture) as I have suspected.

I'm also glad I can usually just sleep it off in a night even in the worst cases, or take 1-2 Ibuprofen and go to a dark, silent room for an hour or two if it's only moderate.

</comment><comment><USER15> Triggers for me are dehydration, tiredness, stress and oo much bad food. I found that eating meat and dairy also had a massive effect on me and led to me giving them up. I have been more or less Vegan since figuring that out 20 odd years ago.

<comment><USER16> Same--I generalized it as basically my body is vindictive about treating it badly. Except I'm better off with meat and dairy. And especially cheese. I have experimented with vegetarianism, but only for my fussiness about my feelings for helpless animals.

<comment><USER15> I dumped meat and dairy as I was also finding the more of that I ate the more time I spent on the toilet. Then you start to read up on what you're actually eating and being an animal lover it all just added up for me.

I should have added that I have also found exercise really helps me as well. High cardio if I feel I could be getting an attack coming usually see's it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> OTC codine which has just been made prescription only here in Australia. Worked perfectly for 30 years. I am not sure what I am going to do when my stash runs out.

Edit. I should add my trigger is UV light which is all too common here in Australia.

<comment><USER18> I feel the exact same way. Codeine has been working for me since 1990, turning hours of pain into ~30 minutes of blurred vision.

Is codeine abuse really a problem in Australia, or more than it has been in previous decades?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How I reduced my headache frequency by at least an order of magnitude. I still suffer from sinus headaches, but that physical cause is easier to deal with than other causes.

1\. Take a long vacation someplace where it's possible to stay the entire day in bed with no light & no sound. (2-4 weeks).

2\. Gradually reduce caffeine intake over the first half of the vacation, with no caffeine for the second half. Suffer through the withdrawal.

3\. Go back to work, using caffeine in small amounts only for medicinal purposes. (Caffeine + ibuprofen works a lot better than just ibuprofen)

4\. Fix sleep issues. The lack of caffeine will make this a lot simpler.

</comment><comment><USER20> +1 for exercising. I'm commuting by bike 2*30min a day, almost no migraine now (except during the holidays, when i'm not). Paracetamol/acetaminophen 1g work pretty well when taken at the beginning of the migraine.

</comment><comment><USER21> I found some relief by holding my breath several times a day (using Wim Hof's breathing protocol).

Not sure about the mechanism of action, but it seems that breath-holding causes vasodilation in the brain.

See: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10472977](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10472977)

And: [https://www.migrainekey.com/blog/10-reasons-why-the-wim- hof-...](https://www.migrainekey.com/blog/10-reasons-why-the-wim-hof-method- freezes-migraines/)

(disclaimer: IANAMD)

</comment><comment><USER22> Long term migraine-with-aura-without-headache patient here. I've found reddit's /r/migraine to be a pretty good resource/support group over the years.

I've not been able to find a source, in spite of years of logging all kinds of data. The only thing I have noticed, but which I don't want to contemplate, is that I have more frequent migraines when I have more sex. Much fun.

I take magnesium supplements and sometimes CoQ10, but I haven't really found either of them to be effective at preventing migraines.

<comment><USER21> You're not alone:

[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sex- headaches...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sex- headaches/symptoms-causes/syc-20377477)

Use of porn can aggravate the condition:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030384671...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303846717302883)

Here's a support forum for related conditions (warning: not secure http):

[http://poiscenter.com/forums/index.php](http://poiscenter.com/forums/index.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My trigger was MSG (monosodium glutamate) but don't take my word for it. strong naturally occurring umamy taste can trigger for me too.

you should keep a journal of everything you eat, especially if you can take note of the ingredients.

For me 1 or 2 days after consumption triggers it, but staying away MSG helps in my case.

MSG sensitivity isn't taken seriously because it only really affect a tiny subset of the population and the food industry has interest in it not alarming the 99%.

I'm taking B2 which strengthens the blood brain barrier too.

<comment><USER24> I've had one experience in Indonesia where I had a massive amount of noodles with a massive amount of MSG in it. Soon after consumption of said noodles, I had a migraine attack. I also had a ton of work stress at that point, so I'm not 100% that MSG was the actual trigger for me.

<comment><USER23> stress will increase the blood flow to your brain and chemicals your liver has metabolised from msg might enter your brain.

that why it's doesn't affect everyone as everyone metabolises things differently.

<comment><USER25> [https://uniqsofts.com/jio-dth-booking/](https://uniqsofts.com/jio-dth- booking/) [https://strackit.com/](https://strackit.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 2 likely triggers:

\- excessive polyunsaturated fats in your diet

\- poorly digested fibers in your intestines

Use butter/coconut oil instead of soybean/canola/sunflower oil if that's your case. Avoid PUFA at all cost.

Also, cut grain-enriched ('whole') bread and avoid grains in general, i.e., favor mashed potatoes over rice, avoid peanuts etc.

Find more here: [https://www.google.com.br/search?q=migraine+ray+peat+forum](https://www.google.com.br/search?q=migraine+ray+peat+forum)

<comment><USER27> Migraines run in my family and a lot of my friends have them (so this is a large anecdote, not research). From that experience, I think "likely" is a bit of a strong term for these triggers. The common factors are pretty clear in this thread: Strong sensory stimuli (visual/auditory, sometimes smell), stress and poor lifestyle habits (little sleep, little exercise, etc). These things are "likely" triggers - most people report one or more of these. The word you're looking for is "possible".

Along with that I'd like to point out nutritional advice is always an option, but in practice it is so personal that it's best taken with a healthy amount of skepticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a bit surprised not to see Excedrin mentioned anywhere. Perhaps it's because it has caffeine and reading some of the comments seems that caffeine (dependence) may be a trigger?

I'm not entirely sure if I get headaches or migraines, but whatever they are, they shut me down for hours and sometimes even a nights sleep doesn't clear them. Depending on the severity, 2-4 Excedrin will clear me up in about 30 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER29> My triggers would be bright light, prolonged loud noise, insufficient food, dehydration, and (I think) pistachios.

In terms of prophylaxis, my neurologist had me supplement with 130 mg of magnesium, which helped. What really knocked down the frequency, though, was when my psychiatrist started me on Lexapro, an SSRI, for anxiety.

When I get an attack anyway, 50mg sumatriptan. Doesn't always totally eliminate it, but usually at least helps.

</comment><comment><USER30> Bright light for me is my major trigger. I wear sunglasses whenever it is bright and keep my head covered or stay in shade.

<comment><USER31> Bright light is the same reason for my migraine triggers, especially during summers with humid conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Cold air hitting my head (A/C air is worst. Fresh cold air doesn't seem to trigger the migraine).

Dehydration.

Direct hot sun hitting my head for 30 minutes plus.

Not eating for 20 hours.

For most of these, the solution for me is rest, sleep, being in a temperate zone and having an electrolyte drink. In extreme cases I might take a paracetamol or ibprophen or a muscle relaxant.

</comment><comment><USER33> My triggers tend to be stress, dehydration and too much screen time. I find that if I can take some aspirin/paracetamol and get to a dark, quiet place as soon as I start to see an aura, I can usually limit the pain somewhat, but I'll still be unable to actually _do_ anything for the duration.

</comment><comment><USER34> In terms of prophylaxis meds, I've tried a few. Currently on a combination of Botox injections, and Sodium Valproate and Topiramate (brand names Epilim and Topamax). I've found they make a huge difference, but they do have some quite unpleasant side effects

</comment><comment><USER21> Found this blogpost:

[http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2013/06/natural-migraine- pro...](http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2013/06/natural-migraine-prophylaxis- treatment.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Been suffering since the last 10 years, for me it's the bright sunlight during the summer accompanied by humid weather conditions(most of the times), I prefer staying in the dark, I love dark rooms for some reason. Makes me feel like a nocturnal.

</comment><comment><USER35> Suffering ever since I remember. What causes them for me and its sometimes unavoidable: 1\. Stress. 2\. Hunger / Dehydration (sometimes you can't just leave everything and go eat). 3\. Spending too much time in the sun.

</comment><comment><USER36> Trigger - less sleep, tension.

Drink 1.5 L of water as soon as you wake up before anything else (including bath etc) and always drink water when in sitting position.

</comment><comment><USER37> For me magnesium (oral) works very well. 100mg to 300mg per day. Decreased my migraine from weekly to once per half year.

</comment><comment><USER38> Of course I have no idea what your problem is. And while I'm not sure I ever quite raised to the level of "migraine", as I only on a couple of occasions got something like a full-blown aura or blurred vision, living with 3-4 major, debilitating headaches a week was a regular occurrence for me in my teens and 20s. (In hindsight I'm not even sure how I got through college. They mostly struck in the afternoon, so I guess I was mostly getting my life lived in the morning, which wasn't much fun since I was an evening person, due to, well, a good chunk of the things I'm about to list....)

In rough order: Discovering I had celiac disease. This was the big breakthrough without which I could make no progress, but it's not the only trigger I have.

Caffeine withdrawal; I have somewhat reluctantly dropped it from my diet because I withdraw at the drop of a hat (did you have 2.5 diet colas instead of 3 by 3pm? Headache time!) and I got tired of having to plan my days around making sure I got the right amount. (Possibly related to celiac; it can affect the speed with which things like that enter the blood stream.)

Discovering I'm not "allergic" to cashews or pistachios in the anaphylaxis sense but that they give me headaches.

Red dye 40. (Mostly in things I shouldn't be eating anyhow, but this was an extra twist of the knife.)

Poor sleeping posture; a new mattress for me was helpful, I'd recommend back exercises for everybody (specifically bridges), or at least everybody 6 foot plus. Excessive snoring/sleep apnea.

Excessive sugar, or even just excessive simple starches; blood sugar spikes.

Dehydration. (For whatever reason, there are a number of situations in which my thirst signal is simply inadequate and I must consciously consume water. I don't die (obviously), but I get _massive_ headaches here that do not respond worth a crap to any OTC painkiller very well. I'm still sorta trying to figure this one out to see if it's a symptom of some other underlying issue, or if it's just the way I am.)

Real root beer, for whatever reason; appears to be more than just the sugar. (This took a while since I don't drink it very often, but it ruined a couple of ice cream social-type things before I figured it out.)

I'm not sure if this was a headache trigger, but discovering that I had some major heart issues that was a total asshole and only appearing while I sleep (vagal paroxysmal atrial fibrillation), so I had almost no clue that I had the issue, almost certainly a further effect of celiac. Treated with magnesium, potassium, taurine and l-arginine, vitamin C, vitamin K, and vitamin D. (Yes, it takes almost all of those for me. Celiac is "fun" when it comes to nutrition; you "get" to learn a lot about nutrients.) The heart issue itself may have been causing headaches directly, it certainly indirectly contributed to the several reasons my sleep has been poor for most of my life.

I recommend trying something like an elimination diet: [https://greatist.com/grow/easy-elimination-diet-for-food- int...](https://greatist.com/grow/easy-elimination-diet-for-food-intolerance) That particular link describes more of a "medium effort" sort of thing; you can also go whole hog and eat nothing but simple meats, fruits, and veggies for a while, and slowly fold things back in over weeks. It's extreme, but if you are someone who is sensitive/allergic to, say, soy, wheat, _and_ dairy, it's really the only sane way to find that out. It blows to find out you've got one or more of the "major allergies" but it's a hell of lot better than _not_ knowing!

Plus there's a chance you do the full elimination diet and it doesn't affect your migraines at all; well, you pretty much eliminated food issues in one fell swoop. Still a win.

Also grab a sleep recording app for your phone and record the audio of your sleep. I'm not sure science is 100% here yet but it seems to me we're going to end up in a place where basically all snoring beyond the most minor indicates bad sleep. If you've got a lot of snoring or any other sign your sleep is compromised, see about getting into a sleep study. In fact I pretty much just uniformly recommend everyone who has not done this do it, because the cost is virtually nil (the apps are free and it takes 5-10 minutes top to set this up for a night) and the potential benefits large; it's worth doing for anyone who isn't 100% sure they're awesomely healthy. If nothing else, the costs are so low it's just worth it to satisfy your own intellectual curiosity about how well you're sleeping; if you discover it's great, well, now you _know_ , which is nice.

As you may have guessed from the previous paragraphs, it took me about 5-8 _years_ to work it all out. But I have gone from being rocked by headaches almost continuously to pretty much never having a headache without knowing exactly what I did wrong, what I should have done instead, and how to prevent it in the future. Losing an evening to headaches is now almost always because I did something stupid, rather than inexplicable life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stress seems to be a trigger for me, so I actively try and keep my work related stress as low as possible - eg. not taking on work with tight deadlines. I also find that drastic changes in my caffeine consumption can also trigger a migraine.

I'm "lucky" in the sense that I start losing a significant part of my vision before a migraine attack, at which point I might smoke a small amount of low quality cannabis (I get extremely anxious when I realise I'm about to get a migraine and I've found this relaxes me and helps for the nausea) as well as taking an oral dose of Rizatriptan Benzoate. I've not had success with other triptans I've used, so I always make sure to have Rizatriptan Benzoate close by.

TLDR, by managing my stress levels along with keeping an eye on my caffeine intake, I've not had a migraine in months.

</comment><comment><USER39> Don't skip your coffee.

<comment><USER31> Caffeine is a great drug to keep migraines under control. No wonder it's used in so many pills to act as a catalyst.</comment></comment>


What really happened at Herculaneum? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/herculaneum-vesuvius/ <comment><USER2> My own little pet theory is, that the idea of the pryoclastic stream coming down from the volcano is wrong. Its the only one we know so far. But if you look at the volcanic activity in the area - you will note that the ground of the ocean floor also rises and falls.

A sort of massive steam release from the ocean - could cook people relatively fast- and when the pyroclastic stream from the volcano arrived, leave the bodies sort of "Pre-cremated".

Of course this theory has its own faults. One beeing that such a steam release usually co-exists with a massive explosion ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa)).. There are no traces of a steam explosion..

<comment><USER3> I've not studied it in detail, but from the images I've seen of the human remains of Herculaneum and Pompeii, I got the impression that those people died a relatively quick death - some painless, some not so much, but relatively quickly.

Given the landscape, my hunch is that a heavier-than-air gas - like carbon monoxide - probably inundated at least some areas, and the people there died of asphyxiation. I hesitate to say they "suffocated" because that implies (to me at least) that they felt as if they were suffocating. Instead, it looks to me like many of them just kinda laid down and went to sleep. That would be consistent with how people die today in enclosed spaces, like chemical tanks, when the oxygen in the air is driven out by a heavier gas. Without the buildup of carbon dioxide in the air there is no indication to the person that anything is wrong until they fall over from lack of oxygen. In an enclosed space that's already filled with the gas before entry, that happens unexpectedly and immediately. In a space where the oxygen in the air is replaced gradually - or if not gradually, at least while people are present - I would expect people to experience drowsiness, lethargy, and perhaps euphoria.

There are examples of entire families perishing there, and they don't seem to be in tortuous poses. I expect that they saw that the people around them were dying. They didn't understand why exactly but likely attributed it to the gods. They felt tired, knew what was coming, and chose to lay down and accept it with their loved ones. Adults likely did so with the full expectation that they would die, in order to comfort their children and loved ones.

There are other examples where it's obvious that the people involved were desperately trying to crawl away from something. Examples where their mouths were open, obviously struggling for one more breath. Those I expect died through asphyxiation by ash, or even by smoke inhalation caused by secondary fires set by the eruption.

In short, my intuition says that there were likely three major causes of death from the eruption: "gentle" asphyxiation through the replacement of atmospheric oxygen, "harsh" asphyxiation through the inhalation of smoke or ash, and direct inundation with pyroclastic flow.

Again, I'm just a lay person here, and haven't even spent a great deal of time studying the topic. It just seems simplistic to me when I read articles that seem to treat everyone in Pompeii and Herculaneum as having died through a single mechanism.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My SaaS is stuck at $10K MRR, now what? - <AUTHOR> We got a little bootstrapped project, got to 10K MRR (took us a couple of years, more than 1000 paying users). We had nice growth until break even (we are very frugal and have other sources of living income, such as day jobs for the devs / past exits of the founder so burn rate is just about $10K), but now it's kind of plateauing. And we don't know why.
10K MRR is not enough to allow hiring more developers, but it's also not negligible.
The biggest issue is that we don't want to raise money, (and not sure with these stats we'll get any good deal out of any investor).
An even bigger issue is that we can't afford help, even a support person will move us back to losses.
The CEO is the angel funder, and we are trying to take it to the next level. Any suggestions? when do you turn your back to a nice lifestyle SaaS that makes more than $10K MRR?
How do we take it to the next level? <comment><USER2> The simplest explanation for the plateau in a SaaS business is that you're likely at the point where churn eats growth, which you can quickly verify by looking at the math. (e.g. If you have 5% monthly churn, which you'd be doing well to have at your price point, then you need to find 50 new accounts every month. If it's card-up-front then that's 100 trials. If you convert 2% of visitors that's 5,000 visits. Just to tread water.)

Your solutions include less churn and more growth. Both of these are deep topics.

That said, given that you have an average account value of around $10 per month, I'd be looking for some way to move upmarket. It's just brutally difficult to build a business at $10 a month unless you have massive Dropboxian scale on the back of a very viral product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some ideas below in no particular order. Pick the lowest hanging fruit.

\- upsell to your customers. Looks like on the average each customer pays $10 per month. Is there anything you can do to give more value to the customers and charge more. (depends completely on your business and customer profile)

\- look at new customer acquisition channels - adwords, facebook, retargetting, forums sales threads, affiliates etc

\- increase spending on current customer acquisition channels. If you have a good idea on your customer LTV, you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to get a single customer.

\- decrease churn - if your churn rate is high, you could analyze why it is so and focus on reducing it. Apart from increasing MRR, reducing churn automatically increase customer LTV and thereby justifies higher market spend.

\- increase number of plans - if you have three plans, add a fourth plan priced at 2X-5X relative to the third plan (offering something of value to customers who can afford to pay more - e.g. phone support).

\- increase pricing across the board - there is no way to know whether you are undercharging without actually increasing the pricing and seeing no change in customer acquisition numbers. The largest plan in my SaaS business has gone from X to 2X over the last 6 months (in three price increments), with no customers complaining of the price being too high. I plan to keep doing this until a decent number of customers tell me that the price is indeed too high. (do remember to grandfather in existing customers)

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny, just listened to a podcast where they talk about a lot saas's hitting a plateau at around 10k a month.

May be worth a listen:

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-231-b...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-231-breaking- through-saas-plateaus-with-ruben-gamez)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do you need to hire more developers? It sounds like you need more customer acquisition. You found 1000 people who were willing to pay so you should know something about your target customers. Finding the next 1000 should be a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1000 paying customers is $10k MRR? Have you considered raising your prices?

Also, read everything patio11 has written at [http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER7> There was an interesting take on TechCrunch this morning on the same topic. I think it applies well to this situation, even though the numbers are different. What is your target market? SMB, consumer, enterprise? I'm guessing SMB or consumer based on average deal size.

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/back-to-the-future-in- enter...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/back-to-the-future-in-enterprise- saas-selling/)

If your average deal size is $10.00 per month. Any way to increase the average deal size? 1000 customers is great. Can you get $20.00 per month out of them upselling or crosselling? More?

If it's an SMB product. I would say you need to hire in the right spots. You mentioned not wanting to raise money but also are looking to take it to the next level. You don't need to raise much, but $500k - $1m at good terms would be enough runway to hire 2-3 sales and 1 support person. From there, you can make the sales commission structure friendly so when they make money, you make money.

If it's consumer, I'm not an expert here. I would focus on marketing vs sales people.

</comment><comment><USER8> You need to Systemise your Sales process.

Businesses that get stuck at $10K MRR have generally built a good enough product and network to bust through the $6,500 MRR black hole that kills a lot of companies, but don't yet have scalable systems for Sales (current priority) or channels (which you'll need to get past $20K MRR).

Where can you gain efficiencies in your Sales process? Is it lead generation, engagement, conversion, or retention?

<comment><USER9> Why is there a problem at $6,500 MRR for a lot of companies?

<comment><USER8> As a general rule, no scalable solutions. It's essentially a 1-person-company at that level and the owners never take the necessary risks (investing in recruitment, technology, marketing, etc) to grow beyond 1-2 people in a garage.

Approximately $80,000 per annum is enough for 1 person to 'comfortably' live on, and if they're doing all the delivery themselves it also probably fills their time; so while there's pressure on them to get to that level, there's usually less urgency to move beyond it. Hence, stuck.

<comment><USER9> I'd think it depends on a lot of factors e.g. how easy it is to copy the idea, is the start-up just selling their time, the nature of the customers, the motivations of the founder etc.

However sounds like a good rule of thumb, and a good question to ask. "Is this the kind of business model that would get stuck at a salary level income".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had this PG advice tagged:

 _" When growth plateaus you pretty much have to start from scratch. You have to treat your situation as if you needed to come with a new startup idea. You can't just somehow revitalize things."_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWavoJsEks#t=9m45s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWavoJsEks#t=9m45s)

</comment><comment><USER11> What you can do depends on what you've got. If the service is consumer facing then growing to 10k paying customers is practical (iff the product is actually viable) and largely a matter of marketing.

On the other hand, if the service is business (e.g. developer) facing, then growing users is a tougher path to growing revenues and the main route is going to be via higher prices (iff the product is actually viable).

If the burn rate is $10k and the income is $10k then it's not really a lifestyle business unless that lifestyle is poverty. Reducing expenses could turn it into a modest source of income, but probably not enough to pay a full time developer in a place like the US.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article might help: [https://unicornfree.com/2013/help-my-saas-isnt- growing](https://unicornfree.com/2013/help-my-saas-isnt-growing) (and the follow-up [https://unicornfree.com/2013/how-i-increased- conversion-2-4x...](https://unicornfree.com/2013/how-i-increased- conversion-2-4x-with-better-copywriting) )

In short, here priorities are: \- Raise prices

\- Convert more trials to paid

\- Retain more already-paying customers (already mentioned)

\- Convert more visitors to trials (already mentioned)

\- Get more visitors

</comment><comment><USER13> consider a personal assistant for 10-12/hr off craigslist, a college kid

you can also probably find an intern or two for free - but you cant really work them you have to teach em

but it can be a godsend for support and marketing

i do a bit of consulting, with only a few days of consulting: i can help... and i can give you a half off rate... i know the startup gamut a-z and am a developer (for 15yrs) as well.. if you want to chat drop me an email at jg [underscore] work [at] kify [dot] com

</comment><comment><USER14> What did you do to get those first 1,000 customers? What are you actively doing now to try to get the next thousand?

</comment><comment><USER15> What's your site? You can send me a link to it (email in profile)

<comment><USER16> Same here, please. I'd appreciate any advice to improve my customer base.</comment></comment>


Hubble Space Telescope Is In Safe Mode After Gyro Failure - <AUTHOR> http://nasawatch.com/archives/2018/10/hubble-space-te.html <comment><USER3> It was originally asserted that the telescope required three working gyros. Later a method was devised to operate using two. [1]

Background information describing Hubble's Pointing Control System.

[https://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/gyroscopes/](https://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/gyroscopes/)

[1] 2005 article: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro- sacrifice-m...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7051-gyro-sacrifice- may-extend-hubbles-life)

<comment><USER4> There is going to be no way to use it with just one. If someone figures out a solution they will be the hero of the decade.

To bad the replacement James Webb Space Telescope is not scheduled till March 20, 2021, 14 years past it's initial launch date of 2007.

It's initial budget was 1.6 billion and it will hit over 9.5 billion when it launches, if it launches. In 2011 Congress moved to cancel the whole thing. If the cost estimate exceeds the $8 billion cap Congress put in place in 2011, as is unavoidable, NASA will have to have the mission re-authorized by the legislature.

Fingers Crossed (My Nasa Photo of the Day Wall Paper isn't going to be so great for the next 3 years I am afraid)

<comment><USER5> Yes, we figured it out years ago. Instead of spending a fortune on manned space flight, spend the money on developing advanced robotics to explore space. In addition, the technology will be usable on earth in manufacturing, etc.

We've had this discussion several times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315339)

We can iterate faster, making less costly mistakes, and blanket the solar system with robots.

It took about a decade for humans to get to the moon once America entered the space race. Everything is taking several times longer now.

<comment><USER6> These are all very practical arguments, but spaceflight is not a practical endeavor. It is fundamentally an emotional activity.

The will to do science originates in the urge to explore. Whether we're spending the money to send people or robots, it's not a rational pursuit. We explore because we want to. Why do we want to? No one knows for sure.

Human spaceflight is valuable because things are emotionally different when a human is doing them. That's why spaceflight is so much more expensive when humans are aboard: because we have higher standards for humans, despite the obvious evidence that human life is abundant and cheap. The value of a human to another human is primarily an emotional calculation, not economic.

Even when the mission remote asset is a robot, we focus on the human element. Coverage of robot missions always includes a lot of people cheering at the launch, reactions in the control room, interviews with project leads, etc.

So, I would not be so quick to dismiss human spaceflight based on metrics of efficiency. The whole thing of exploring space is inefficient, and serves no practical purpose. Spaceflight runs on inspiration, and that's something we haven't figured out how to automate (and IMO never will).

<comment><USER7> As others have already mentioned, spaceflight has useful applications at creating a long term stable population center outside of Earth. There's also the commercial application of being able to gather vast resources relatively cheaply from the asteroid belts once there's a platform to routinely and cheaply transfer cargo up to space, down is relatively easy. We're going to run out of raw resources at some point and this will be the least costly application. Deep well drilling could access large amounts of trapped resources however the cost is prohibitive for the return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe someone who knows satellites can help here. I assume with one gyro the satellite still has pointing function because one gyro senses in 3 axis, but that if that one gyro were to go it would no longer know where it was pointing or perhaps without enough accuracy for science.

But... it's a telescope. Couldn't it determine direction from images received from a spotting or wide angle lens? Does it not have one?

<comment><USER9> No. The gyros are more accurate. If it were to use reference stars, through the big camera, any detected motion would be at least one pixel. So every image would be blurry. It has to react before any drift results in movement more than a pixel.

<comment><USER10> Actually, you can do substantially better than one pixel, because the point spread function is bigger than one pixel. Even a technique as simple as centroiding will get you sub-pixel accuracy.

<comment><USER9> Yes but to get there you need detectable movement, a change in the image because of motion. A pixel has to change somewhere, the definition of blur. Sub-pixel blur is still blur.

<comment><USER11> No, you can get sub-pixel accuracy with a static image. The point is the star takes up multiple pixels, and when it moves by less than a pixel, some pixels get brighter while others get dimmer.

This is a common fallacy in computer vision. Often people get to a within a pixel and stop because they assume they can't get better. Most times you can get substantially better. I worked on a qr-code like system where the scanner could reconstruct the code from an image with (slightly) less pixels than 'pixels' in the code.

<comment><USER12> Interesting observation. This works presumably because the output of a pixel is not just one bit, but some sort of continuous brightness reading (discretised, of course, sooner or later)?

Not obvious a priori, but makes sense.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_spread_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_spread_function)

The light is blurred, with a fairly predictable pattern, so if you fit a function to the shape, you can find the peak of the function and that is the most likely center position for the point source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "No longer in operation" - not strictly true. Looks like it will return to operation soon, but in 1-gyro mode, which means its operations will be restricted.

<comment><USER15> 1-gyro mode..... I am counting on how long can we keep Hubble up there, or how long until we need to put another costly service mission up there.

<comment><USER16> It only needs to be operational until the James Webb Telescope is available.

As soon as this happens, most astronomers will jump ship anyway

<comment><USER17> completely different devices built for completely different purposes. there's nothing quite like the hubble.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but the jump is still tempting for the scientific top brass. There's only so much that can be learned in the visible spectrum and only so many Noble prizes, PhDs, tenures and grants to be had. Staying on Hubble is scraping the barrel when the new sexy JWST promises to open whole new fields of scientific inquiry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know the shuttle is long gone but are we at the point where robotic repair could be an option. The Hubble might be out of date but that would be a great exercise in developing repair tech.

<comment><USER20> Could be wrong but my understanding is the issue preventing repair is the expense in getting to the Hubble.

So whether it's via robot or human spacewalk (though a manned operation is even more expensive obviously) the issue is the prohibitive expense of getting to the Hubble to fix it.

<comment><USER21> Orbital apogee is only 540.9 km[0]. SpaceX launched a satellite to an orbit of 640km last night for what I presume was it's usual $60m launch price.

So 'getting to the Hubble' is pretty low in price, all things considered. Now the hard part: building something that can _fix_ the Hubble. Humans would be good at making repairs, but the SpaceX Dragon capsule doesn't have an airlock, so that won't work easily. Repairs might be doable by a robot, but I suspect the easier option would be to simply attach new parts to it to perform the broken functionality.

If you can build the new piece for $40m, that's $100m to add another 20+ years to the lifespan of this incredible piece of equipment. Heck, sounds like something Bezos might do just for fun and as a test for his New Glenn rockets.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope)

<comment><USER22> Rather than repair it in space, would it be easier to bring it back to earth, refurbish it and relaunch? That would be $120M plus refurbish costs. Or am I underestimating how hard it would be to bring it back to the ground?

<comment><USER23> > _would it be easier to bring it back to earth, refurbish it and relaunch?_

At that point you'd just launch a new one. Earth's gravity well assesses a steep tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hubble has been in the orbit since 1990, out of curiosity, what is the designated program life and what replacements are scheduled?

<comment><USER25> There have been five (5) successful missions to Hubble—beginning in 1993, then 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2009.[1]

The final mission, STS-125/SM4 (servicing mission 4), was done to prolong the life of the telescope. During the 12-day mission, they installed two (2) new instruments and performed two (2) repairs of failed equipment, and six new batteries in addition to replacing gyroscopes. This expected to extend Hubble's lifespan by five (5) years from 2009.[2] So we were looking at an expected 2014 EOL date.

The 2009 mission was an interesting event in itself with Hubble's durability aside. During a talk from Dr. Andrew Fuestel, he mentioned how NASA developed specialized tools for him to repair Hubble mid-orbit—which he said were the scariest times of his life—during his three (3) spacewalks.

[1] [https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/missions/sm4.html](https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/missions/sm4.html)

[2][http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/fil...](http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/home/spacenews/files/1ae7cac0d167055e41e1f0da7b0ac6a3-588.html)

<comment><USER26> Any idea what made it the scariest times?

I mean, obviously going on a spacewalk must be pretty intense. But is there a particular difference in doing it to the Hubble?

Or was it scary because he was repairing a very expensive piece of equipment?

<comment><USER25> IIRC, there were a few different reasons why it was scary.

One of the first was this mission was the last one, it was a difficult repair—SC4 did the first in-orbit repair—to do at the time, especially outside of the telescope. Because when you leave the safety of the shuttle, you're traveling at a rate of ~17,000MPH and where the hubble orbits, there is a much higher chance of debris floating around than as if they were lower in the atmosphere. So in laymen terms, you're attached to a cord that is supplying you with O2 and spinning at 17,000 MPH while trying to avoid rocks and other dangerous floating objects.

One other danger was the O2 levels. He said the suits are heavy, all of your tools are attached to you via cords and you have limited time to be outside. If something where to happen in this situation, not only would you become unconscious within seconds from the lack of O2, you'd pretty much be a forever piece of debris floating around the galaxies as your body will never decompose or fall from orbit.

The latter part was one of his biggest worries. He knew that he's on limited time, he also had to renter the shuttle slow because it's similar to divers and decompression. If for some reason he went too fast or there was a leak somewhere, his suit would have instantly filled up and the pressure would have blew him apart inside the suit.

<comment><USER26> Oh wow. Awesome.

Definitely not a walk in the proverbial park.

Thanks for the details!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can`t wait for James Webb telescope to be launched! And I`m a bit anxious about the process of putting it safely into space.

<comment><USER28> Why anxious? They've put other telescopes into space before. Is that one more sensitive or something?

<comment><USER29> Apart from being the largest and most complex of its kind ever sent to space, the tricky thing is that it will be positioned at the Sun-Earth L2 point, far beyond the orbit of the moon.

Hubble was as successful and long-living as it was because of several manned maintenance, upgrade and repair missions mentioned by others already - <USER2> Hubble is in a LEO, only a few 100km from Earth. The JWST? 1.5 million km. So missions like these aren't going to happen, this has to work on the first try.

<comment><USER30> Have the Hubble servicing missions been actually cost-effective or was that more something that could be done because the Space Shuttle existed, although building a replacement would have been cheaper? (The latter would probably have had a problem having its budget approved, compared to the servicing missions, I guess.)

<comment><USER31> Hard to put a price on astroscience or cosmology. Hubble was just recently assisting in the search for the very first discovered exo-moon.

[http://earthsky.org/space/1st-exomoon-neptune-sized- kepler-1...](http://earthsky.org/space/1st-exomoon-neptune-sized- kepler-1625b-hubble)

In the mid-1990s, after Hubble had its optics corrected, researchers were already planning its successor. The catch phrase in NASA at the time was "faster, better, cheaper." JWT was announced in 1996 to a standing ovation, yet it's current planned launch is due 25 years after that announcement. (note that it's infrared, not optical)

<comment><USER32> > Hard to put a price on astroscience or cosmology.

It's pretty easy. Did those missions cost more or less than making a copy of Hubble and launching it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Would it be possible to dock a second satellite, with new gyros, to he deorbiting rendevouz ring they installed a few years ago?

</comment><comment><USER34> Scott Manley released an excellent video today about what this really means in the context of Hubble's various attitude sensing and control systems: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY169HtCazE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY169HtCazE)

</comment><comment><USER35> What about these two other, very similar space telescopes that were made available by some intelligence service (CIA?) to NASA?

<comment><USER36> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Tel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope) that's one of the two.

<comment><USER35> Ah yes, that's the context I was looking for: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Oh no :( Safe mode is bad! The pictures will be limited to 640x480x256. Looking into the neighborhood will not be possible, too.

<comment><USER38> Let's hope they select "Safe Mode with Networking" otherwise they'll have a "brick" in orbit ;-) As a side note (nightmare scenario), image if HST had Windows 10 and was forced to do the fu$%ed up updates from M$ every now and then :-)

<comment><USER39> Slashdot is that way, buddy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Url changed from [http://Twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/1049111536550273024](http://Twitter.com/NASAWatch/status/1049111536550273024), which points to this.</comment>