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Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

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11–20 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#11
post #8

A solution for game assets building. Ideally it would be possible to build all assets (maps, models, textures, binaries) in a game from source files to the format that's distributed to people. Unfortunately due to the build times for certain things like maps it's not feasible to rebuild everything before every release. Combined with the fact that the files are relatively large means that we can't store everything in…

Could you set this up using gulp?

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#12
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Have you seen Andromium as an early take on this concept?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#13
post #12
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Have you seen Andromium as an early take on this concept? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

That's very cool!

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#14
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

And let us install whatever OS we want on that hw.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#15
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Microsoft showcased something similar - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/accessory/hd-500/ using Windows Phones

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#16
post #9
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

I don't want VC funding, I want Microsoft to go in this direction. Their phone OS was great, I generally like their tablets, and most desktop software works already on Windows. If anyone from Microsoft is listening I want them to do this.

Yep, I am genuinely excited to see where Microsoft goes with this.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#17
post #3

Source-specific IP Multicast support on the open internet, which probably needs some serious magic to make it feasible on core routers, if it is solvable at all. Some shabby server in someone's basement could stream data to millions. CDNs would no longer be needed.

There is a great fear of Multicast from many network engineers I talk to. This comes from at its core, it being too easy to create cycles. At the internet scale the potential for cycles would be even higher, b/c the TTL needed would have to be on the order of ~20-30 hops, and many engineers will just set this number too high.

Now I don't have experience with Source-specific Multicast, which is supposed to resolve the cycle problem, but I think there remains a lot of fear of Multicast in the industry.

Can anyone else comment on cycle issues?

Also, in terms of scaling, Multicast requires of copy of the packet on the router to every port which is registered as a listener to a Multicast address, this will increase load on the larger routers.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#18
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Windows phones already do this, less development tools. Its cool because e.g. Word mobile has the desktop and phone UI in the same package and presents itself appropriately.

I would be surprised if, with more competitive Intel chips or x86 on ARM emulation (the latter of this is in the works afaik), this didn't happen sooner or later.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#19
A programming language and toolset that could transpile to human readable code for just about every popular/mainstream language out there. The closest I've seen is Haxe. This would be great for sharing business logic between different platforms. Right now it's a fragmented mess of tools of various quality, many using regexes to get you only 90% there. For example pretty much everything can transpile very well to Javascript, so no problem there. But what if I want to write common code for iOS, Android, and the web? I've never figured out a good solution here besides contortions with C/C++ or Javascript that introduced more problems than it was worth. Either that or you have to go all-in with a big framework like Xamarin.

I think part of the problem is that there isn't a demand, and, if I may rant a little, the reason there isn't a demand is that most developers do not separate business logic and platform-specific stuff (rendering, I/O, etc.) in the first place, whether from lack of skill/experience (which everyone including me is guilty of early in their careers), or the fact that the framework/platform you're working in "discourages" it.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#20
post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

I don't understand. If you already are planning on using it with 3 monitors, what is the advantage of making it so portable? Why not just leave a slightly larger device where the monitors are and use the small device as storage / boot disk?
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