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Ask HN: What annoys you?

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Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#101

Post by tel »

SandB0x wrote: post #89

Food. I miss the healthy, affordable, sociable dining halls from university. There are people who cook better than I do, and who should be able to make great food at a reasonable price by buying fresh ingredients in bulk. My options for eating are * Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food. * Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small p…

It's not quite the replacement for a dining hall, but learning to cook is not only cheap but really enriching in other ways as well.

  1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms
     to "impossible to not be healthier".
  2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships 
     both friendly and romantic.
  3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and
     second degree strangers is a GREAT way to meet new people.
I forget who it is, but there's a HNer around who's had great successes throwing open-to-all, multi-course Hacker Dinners and taught himself the skills more or less on the fly. At the end of the day, everybody eats; almost everybody can enjoy interesting, tasty food; and those who can skillfully, confidently serve that up become a social hub.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#104

Post by tel »

daleharvey wrote: post #7

Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me, same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always an order of magnitude better.

I've had a lot of success with the CouchSurfers community. It's a travel oriented site, but they also promote meetups for the people living in a city so as to form a tighter, most trusting community. When you throw travel-wise tourists, friendly city ambassadors, and generally open-minded go-out-and-tackle-the-world style people together in a room and have them share stories or plan events it gets crazy and amazing really, really quickly.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#105

Post by spudlyo »

rdouble wrote: post #98
mrduncan wrote: post #11

Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?

I've had great experiences on Virgin America. It's cheap, the planes are nice, there is wifi, the terminals are better, the stewards and stewardesses are pleasant and good looking, etc.

Me too. I had no idea flying could be so enjoyable. I've made the Seattle -> SF trip a 4-5 times this year on Virgin and I've been over the moon at how easy and comfortable it's been.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#106

Post by Eliezer »

Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for cryonics.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#108

Post by loewenskind »

daleharvey wrote: post #2

Identity - I am sick of having to create accounts on every website in the world, OpenID is an awesome solution but it needs to be implemented ubiquitously, I do not want everything tied to my twitter or facebook account.

Systems like Password1 solve this for me, with the added benefit that if someone manages to hack one of these sites and capture my password for it they'll have a bunch of random characters that wont work for anything else I have.

Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#109

Post by Eliezer »

Non-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental, elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a conclusion first and then come up with arguments for it, or the Bayesian definition of evidence that forms the foundation of all belief updates in epistemic rationality, or why violating the expected utility theorem by failing to assign consistent utilities always means leaving some value on the table.

I am writing a book to solve this problem.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#110

Post by ovi256 »

tjr wrote: post #21

Informal music notation. Existing systems are fine enough for formal classical notation, but if you want to make a quick rough sketch (e.g., lead sheets in The Real Book ) it's pretty cumbersome, and the amount of time & effort it takes doesn't seem commensurate with the sort of document desired. I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a pretty fundamental switch in how the data is ent…

Have you thought about piano rolls ? Either paper-based ones that you draw yourself, or use software like Reason that has a piano roll for note input or display, nor sheet music. Actually, most non-classic music software has piano rolls.
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