Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

news.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 535 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#191

A non-cloud off-site backup appliance. This is what I want (I know there are alternatives, but this is what I want): A device that I buy, and can plug at least one hard drive in to. I give it some sort of passphrase. I then place it in a friend's house and connect it to their internet connection. I can then access it remotely from my house. I can easily backup my stuff to it. My backups are encrypted, both over the w…

Try Synology Hyperdrive. I'd assume that all the other NAS vendors do something similar.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#192
post #174

A paid Linux. To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing. Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it's closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we're not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for wo…

Would something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SuSE fit what you're looking for (both are paid, commercial Linux distributions), or am I misunderstanding?

I agree with the patent that a highly polished version of Linux would go a long way toward further adoption.

As someone who has worked as both a sysadmin and software developer for many years, RHEL and SuSE are not any better than the other Linux distros in terms of polish and usability.

RHEL/SuSE are "enterprise" Linux, meaning you pay the vendor for a phone number to call when things don't work according to the documentation.

As primarily server-based operating systems, they receive no extra UI polishing than their free counterparts (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu). I would argue that they often receive even less because as server operating systems, the vendors expect you to run them mostly in a headless environment.

In fact, since they are so "enterprise" and have long support/release cycles, they frequently featured software which is years out of date even on the day of release. Because the software has had several months/years since release, all the obvious show stopping bugs have been quashed, so now it's "ready for enterprise."

I would say that back in the day (mid-2000s), I would probably have considered Mandrake Linux to be the most polished. They had a graphical software center years before Ubuntu did. Unfortunately they found, as many others did over the years, that unless you're #1 or #2 in the desktop Linux distribution list, eventually the money dries up and you're toast.

Not to knock "enterprise Linux" too much. It has it's time and place: when you need a stable operating system with vendor support that you plan to develop and release a product on and expect that product to work for several years without major attention.

But for polished desktop use, they're worse than the other free distributions like Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Fedora, both because enterprise Linux distributions lack recent software, and because the documentation is frequently behind a pay wall and only produced by the vendor (instead of say the Arch Linux or Gentoo wiki).

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#193
I'd like for someone to bring "social graph" in to center of computing. Now we have good tools for manipulating files/data but communication with others seems like an afterthought. Which it of course is because of historical reasons. To reach others I need to go through various platforms, which are self-contained with their own tools for text manipulation and image manipulation etc. Communication could be the starting point for new OS design.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#194
A way to use Mechanical Turk from outside the US. I've needed it with every client I ever worked with, and I need it now and know a dozen companies who do.

CrowdFlower has a de facto monopoly on the outside of the US supply and charges an enormous premium for it - enough to turn off most of them. I certainly don't want to pay several thousand a month for the right to submit jobs, although I was ok with the 25% premium in the old days.

If it's an alternative marketplace, it has to have excellent automation via API. I'm not going to use this for questionnaires, I'll be submitting thousands of jobs automatically.

If you have built this already, please email me.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#195

A big, high resolution eBook reader with fast refresh rate. And it should be extremely cheap. A phone/tablet with replaceable/attachable screen, to add an e-ink screen when I want to.

These exist (except the cheap part, which is really state-of-tech dependant).

Look at Yotaphone 2.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#196
An operating system with an interface that's a substantial improvement over POSIX. I'd like to see statically typed files and pipes, and a built-in file conversion solver so that if I have, say, a postscript file and I want it in pdf format, I can just tell the OS to use any conversion utility with a matching type signature and I don't have to remember what it's called.

I'd like a process/thread to be able to have multiple current-working-directories at the same time, so that a library can change the directory without effecting the rest of the program.

Similarly, I'd like processes to be able to operate on behalf of multiple users at the same time.

I'd like stricter security policies that deny network access, file system access, etc.. unless they've been explicitly turned on (like Android or IOS).

I'd like transactional semantics for filesystem updates. No process should be able to see changes made by another process until that process does a "commit".

I'd like to have a general command-line undo. I'd like to be able to do "rm -rf /*" and then undo the operation and have everything be restored.

I'd like to have something like proc files, but for user space applications.

My full wish list is quite a bit longer, but that's good enough for now.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#198
post #174

A paid Linux. To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing. Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it's closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we're not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for wo…

That was Mandrake/Mandriva, yet the margins were slim and they went bankrupt.

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#199

I would like a vi for spreadsheets. It should run in the terminal, and be able to read/save csv/xls/xlsx/ods files. It should understand formulas. I should let me navigate with vi-style keys, and have a separate mode for editing a cell's contents (with escape to go back to navigation mode). It should perform well even for very large documents (many rows or many columns, but especially many rows). I propose that it be…

Like this? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699

Re: Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

#200
A smart bank account:

I want to set up rules like "take 19 percent of every incoming transaction and save it to virtual account 'taxes'. Use this, account to pay invoices by $financialAgency"

Banking hasn't produced any innovation since online banking, it seems

Post reply on HN