An idea I've thought about but abandoned personally: Getting market prices/reviews for services (contrasted with goods. That is, the prices charged by plumbers, auto mechanics, etc.) It's easy to find out the going rate on a 1 TB external hard drive. Not so much regarding replacing brake pads in a given zip code radius.

Not a weekend startup, of course.

As a sweeping generalisation, I find people of our generation (assuming we're all young twentysomething hackers, mostly) far less informed on what you should be paying for these sorts of services than our parents. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of us are happy to throw money at the problem as long as the prices aren't too unreasonable.

That probably has a lot to do with having more experience and mostly age (read: time to get experience with it). Not so much with generations...

perhaps I should have qualified with 'than our parents would have been at our age', then.

Of course, I've probably been listening to too many stories of the good old days from mine, lately..!

You know, talk about replacing brake pads! I just had mine replaced, and I had this coupon that made it $99 for resurfacing and other labor (of course the replacement was another $105) instead of $159, so that worked out well. If you're actually interested in that sort of thing, I highly recommend actually opening that ValPak junk mail, there's usually some really good coupons in there.

This is in response to Dave McClure visiting Startup Weekend SF this weekend. Your pitch is selling a problem, what are problems that you have? What products that you would like to see solved... generally on a smaller app basis (us being at Startup Weekend and all).

We used UserVoice for this, btw.

I'd like responses to my news.yc comments to show up in growl.

if news.yc used Disqus, this would [potentially] be much easier.

Here’s more of a "challenge" than a problem I’d appreciate feedback on. Our team-of-two is creating an iPhone App for Kiva (no, there’s not one already). It’s obviously down to the wire on what functionality will make it in for the launch tonight. Knowing you guys are probably familiar with www.Kiva.com, any feedback on the functionality you’d most want is appreciated. More specifically, what's the one thing you'd want your Kiva App for iPhone to do?

Now back to work.

The really big difference of the iPhone is that it's mobile, and is therefore around in social settings. Because of that I think the killer use case for a Kiva iPhone app is evangelizing Kiva to others: showing them the investments I've made, the repayments, the status updates from the entrepreneurs, and letting people look around for other people on the site that appeal to them. Help me show my friends - over dinner - that they should put money into Kiva. Actually signing up or doing lending on the iPhone, I think will always be simpler on my full computer.

When you were pitching the idea Dave McClure mentioned that the biggest problem Kiva has is inventory of borrowers, not of lenders. I think that didn't come properly over the mic.

I think what you're doing is great - I'm stopping by Startup Weekend later on today and will say hello. Have they fixed the wifi problems yet?

Thanks for the insightful input Justin. Come say hello when you get here. As for interwebs, @tylerwillis said the capacity is now doubled so it shouldn't be a problem, but I'll be there in 20 to test.

Apparently my login for Uservoice is only half correct, because it doesn't throw an error but sends me to your site still logged out. I'm very annoyed with the whole thing so I can't even vote on your projects. Have fun with uservoice.

Is it an error because we are using a subdomain? i.e. you are logged into uservoice.com but not problems.startupweekend.com?

Just a guess.

Uservoice is just very finicky about my passwords and such. I logged in with Gmail afterward and that worked, then I tried to link it to my account using a l/p that I know is good, and so it apparently accepted it and forwarded me to problems.startupweekend.com where it suggested I log in. I had a lot of fun doing that dance, and hope to never do it again.

Known bug related to domain aliasing (session cookie set on one domain and not the other). Sorry about that, we're working to get that fixed.

What software are they using for this voting thing?

UserVoice

an Ajax toolkit for building flowchart style UIs. So many web apps could benefit from more visual, floating, drag & drop UI

Does anybody know what time the Sunday demos actually start?

7pm