Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 535 posts

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

#311

Post by localdomain »

tajen wrote: 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…

fwiw, I pay for RHEL7 Workstation ($299/yr for standard support, I think it's cheaper if you buy self-support) and it's fairly well polished out of the box. Also, now I have someone to call if I have issues. Not that I couldn't fix them myself, but I'd rather spend my time on issues I get paid to fix.

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

#313

Post by alexdowad »

elihu wrote: post #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 mu…

elihu, these are some good ideas here. I would love to see your "full wish list". Can you post it somewhere?

More improvements on the POSIX interface:

- Processes should be able to reserve some % of both CPU and I/O bandwidth. So you can have video players, games, etc. which remain perfectly smooth no matter what other processes are running at the same time.

- I would also like it if the kernel and its drivers would refuse to 1) write to the boot sector of any disk, and 2) reflash firmware on any device, even if requested by root, unless the computer is booted in a special "maintenance mode". That would eliminate persistent rootkits.

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

#314

Post by 4ad »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #304
cm2187 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on people's needs. Transfering a 4GB file over wifi is pretty painful. Transfering a 50GB VM... forget about it.

Do you use a MacBook? They are one of the few notebooks that have 3-stream wifi hardware, which is why I'm consistently getting 800+Mbps in our Ubiquiti equipped office.

Yep. I get 800+ Mbps with Macbooks, iMacs, and Routerboard (Mikrotik) access points.

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

#316

Post by infinityplus1 »

anilgulecha wrote: post #195
infinityplus1 wrote: post #171

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.

Yotaphone 2 does not have a removable e ink screen. I'm imagining a phone where the screen is removable/replaceable with another screen (possibly e-ink). Plug and play.

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

#317

Post by kyriakos »

4ad wrote: post #290
ehnto wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just put my clothes in the tumble drier, and they come out pretty sharp. Not possible for all types of clothing, but for pants and shirts it works a treat.

I didn't believe this until I tried a dryer in the US. Here in Europe all the dryers I've seen wrinkle so bad they are unusable for anything but underwear. But in the US I've see several instances of these magical dryer that don't wrinkle clothes. I don't know what is the secret formula of american dryers and why can't they be found in Europe too.

I don't use one cause 1. My clothes end up a size smaller. 2.I live in a warm climate where we are allowed to hang clothes out. 3. Dryer is the most power hungry household appliance.

Other than that in my experience clothes do get partly ironed. T-shirt and jeans are fine but shirts still need ironing.

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

#318

Post by maligree »

neilsharma wrote: post #235

1) More high quality news analysis content. Think NASA Earth Observatory, The Information, or the best articles you've ever read, and put them behind a paywall. Consistently making top notch content is hard, but I suspect it can be easier if writers are paid good wages to explore their interests and the news industry decouples itself from advertising. I'd pay for it, and I suspect that over time, enough people would.…

For #4 check out The School of Life: https://www.theschooloflife.com

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

#319

Post by EnderMB »

tajen wrote: 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…

I think there is definitely a demand for a beautiful Linux desktop system, but it would be a tough ask.

A few open source projects have had success with the crowdfunding model, when something non-trivial is in demand. If there is a possibility to get someone with a history of stunning design and UX on board, I could see a ton of money being donated for that persons time to build a rival desktop system.

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

#320

Post by greydius »

nnq wrote: post #276
tajen wrote: 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…

You don't want a paid Linux . You want a paid Linux desktop-system - aka a "desktop environment software package" which support running on top of 3 most popular Linux server distros: RHEL, Ubuntu Server, Debian. The only reason I and a lot of other people use Linux on desktops is because everything we work on runs on Linux servers and we want the same OS on our machines that runs on the server (even if we also use vi…

> The only reason I and a lot of other people use Linux on desktops is because everything we work on runs on Linux servers

That may be true, but there are also a lot of people (myself included) that just prefer a Linux OS. I like having a choice of desktop environments. I like that a huge amount of software is freely available and just a "suda apt-get install" away. I like that there's no shitty bloat-ware on my systems.

Post reply on HN