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Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#121

Post by xchaotic »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #102

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

when you think it through, it's simply better to keep heat/electricity usage to a minimum, and just keep stuff better insulated overall. And I would say this area of problems is still being worked on, but you know physics gets in the way, and iterating in housing is a lot slower than software...

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#122

Post by therealmarv »

diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…

As somebody who deals with converting documents a lot on a professional level I say: LaTeX is a dead end. It's a horrible format to convert LaTeX to something else except PDF/Print/Images (where it is near perfect of course). You cannot even interchange documents between Word and LaTeX in an easy automated round trip way AFAIK.

Btw. I linked before a link to usable Markdown variations for academic papers which use LaTeX as a mix in only when necessary.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#123

Post by hak8or »

Balgair wrote: post #79
f6v wrote: post #30

We’ve got a very limited understanding of biology. Ask any kind of researcher and they’ll tell you we need more data, i.e. more experiments. Also, there’s Illumina monopoly in sequencing market, we desperately need competition for genetics to become accessible to general population.

There's a poster out there of all the relevant chemistry of human mitochondria. It's a pretty big poster, about a square meter of paper. Every pore and protein's function is represented. The Kreb's Cycle is in a corner of this thing. All the chain reactions are there, with lines trying to vainly connect it all together. The font on it is ~9 pt., I think. And it's double sided. I can't find a good link on Google, but…

Can someone find this poster? I would utterly love to buy it and hang it somewhere, but I can't find it when googling.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#124

Post by thedevindevops »

dhruvkar wrote: post #9

Regenerating top soil. We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well. At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption. https://www.scientificamer…

The regenerative agriculture movement is gaining significant momentum in Austraila; https://regenfarmers.com.au/

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#126

Post by canofbars »

renjimen wrote: post #125

Overpopulation. It's the main source of humanity's current woes and will only get worse with time. We seem to be content with addressing the symptoms rather than the problem. The idea of population control is taboo but will help everyone in the long run.

Surprisingly capitalism seems to be helping here. A lot of people feel they are unable to afford to own a house and have kids at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#128

Post by dalai »

diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…

Not just LaTeX, groff gets no love even though it can deliver nice output. The syntax is even more arcane, but on the other hand it doesn’t need GBs to install.

Asciidoctor is a good modern proposition that can handle more than markdown can, but it’s not without shortcomings. Unfortunately markdown, asciidoc, rst and friends have been focusing too much on publishing to the web. Conversion to PDF is mostly over html (in some cases by firing chromium in the background) and the results are not as great.

It is difficult to compete with Word for non-technical people, if the alternative is to install and learn multiple tools, configure a dev environment and setup build toolchains.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#129

Post by spideymans »

Taikonerd wrote: post #104

Voice interfaces. We have Siri and Alexa, yes, but they're very limited -- they just have a list of pre-programmed tasks they know how to do. I realize that a fully-general voice interface is an "AI-hard" problem, but surely we can improve over what's on the market now?

One of the challenges with voice assistants is that voice is a very low bandwidth medium for communicating information. If I ask Siri to tell be about Bill Gates, it would take her a minute to read to me what I could skim in seconds from a Google Search result.

Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

#130

Post by kylewatson »

Tobias42 wrote: post #105
gisborne wrote: post #84

Computing tools for non—programmers. In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker). Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better. I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.

I recently thought about this, too. Is there any cloud-based, simple relational database, aimed at non-programmers?

QuickBase and Knack are along those lines.

A long time ago I used QuickBase. It was like a Google sheets before google sheets and you could couple multiple sheets together, relating them.

It has probably come a long way since then, but ironically, I can't get past the marketing ui of the website to see how it really works.

Fucking marketing people love to hide the product behind bullshit.

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