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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?

#321

Post by kreeben »

uncomputation wrote: post #300

Voice assistant technology. It seems like Alexa and Siri keep getting more features and integrations (one far more than the other) but the actual language processing is rather basic. A different way of phrasing something throws off the assistant entirely, or your basically using a hard-coded menu just with your voice.

It seems to me we that need an app on our devices that we trust that is divorced from the device's OS (and it's vendor's cloud) that will help us in transitioning from hard-coded voice interfaces driven by dictionaries of known commands and interfaces that simply fail to understand you to something that is truly useful to us and that gets better and more useful over time. Until we have a voice assistant or voice driven OS, can we please have some of us working on a voice-driven work-flow?

My eye sight is getting worse by the day and my finger joints are getting sore. I need a voice driven work-flow, soon.

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

#322

Post by TeMPOraL »

screye wrote: post #252

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows) I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it. Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a re…

Strongly agreed. Ever since I bought a 2-in-1 device with a pen, I lament at the dearth of applications that make good use of pens/styluses. It's a really powerful mode of input, but you can't treat it as just a funny mouse.

Also strongly seconding the graph point. Over the past few years, I've learned to see directed graphs everywhere (particularly in task/project management, something I rant on every now and then). It's a truly powerful mental model, it's a natural model for representing quite a lot of things, and yet it's also terribly underutilized on the UI/UX side.

Currently, I'm thinking about writing my own todo app ( :) ) with a strong graph twist. I've already switched from org-mode and all the Trellos/planners to Microsoft Project, of all things, precisely because it understands that tasks form a graph and not a shallow tree. But MS Project's UX is quite clunky if you want to use it as a day-to-day task management tool. I think there's a lot of space for improvement here.

(A nice side effect for using MS Project to break down my own work is that when my PM asks me about my progress during our 1:1s, I just show her the GANTT chart, which cleanly communicates my plan, the order of things, their interdependencies, and estimated delivery date. I've learned to appreciate GANTT charts myself, too.)

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

#323

Post by MDWolinski »

chronolitus wrote: post #87

Self driving on highways. I know many companies are focusing on tier V, everywhere. but it's starting to look like an AI-hard problem to me, and might not yield a usable solution for a while. Meanwhile, I believe cars could do motorway driving from entry to exit today, if we focused on that. With LiDAR, some extra safety hardware on roads, coordination with local highway services, a company could make a car that is f…

I think the key to fully autonomous vehicles is a three part solution: Smart cars, smart roads, and car to car communication. The current view is to build all the intelligence into the cars, but as we've seen from Tesla, this effort is hard and there are an unlimited number of variables the vehicle needs to adapt to.

However, if the cars were able to communicate and get information from the road itself (speed limit, turns, traffic control etc) then the car doesn't need to be able to figure this out. Yes, it'd take awhile to retrofit roads.

Car to Car communication could be used to let vehicles know how the traffic is flowing without needing to use radar/lidar to determine when traffic is slowing ahead.

These are very basic thoughts on the subjects.

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

#324

Post by zbowling »

gangstertim wrote: post #317

Battery-operated household items. I have a cordless dewalt drill that I can use all day on my jobsite, but every single appliance in my kitchen needs a cord. Hand mixer? Immersion blender? Regular blender? Stand mixer? Everything has a cord. Why isn't there a kitchen battery system yet? Similarly: I'd love to have a little reading sconce on my wall next to my bed, but running a circuit through the existing walls with…

Battery powered devices like this do better with brushless motors to save battery. Corded devices which can use a brushed motor since they can sacrifice some electrical efficiency. Good brushless isn't cheap. Fixed appliances this aren't really going to go from kitchen to kitchen like your drill either. Probably pulling it out from the counter and using it and then putting it away. Why deal with batteries?

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

TrackerFF wrote: post #319

It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but: Cure for hair-loss. Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry. Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-…

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by TeMPOraL »

mfontani wrote: post #310
slg wrote: post #279

A way for a company I interact with infrequently to identify me over the phone. Pin codes and secret questions are easy to forget when they can literally go years without being used. What was my favorite movie when I setup my ISP account in 2016? This leads to customer service reps that are too forgiving and are easily susceptible to social engineering.

Randomize the answers to those things, and stick them in your password manager alongside (or separate from) the log-in information. Site asks for my mother maiden's name? Let me check "pwgen 18 1"... That'll be "Viquo4cai2gienoo2p".

That may be vulnerable to social engineering if the person on the other side accepts "I'm using a randomly generated string of letters" as an answer :). So if your password manager accepts user-provided passwords, I'd just string two or three random words together and use that as the maiden name.

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

#328

Post by lioeters »

kethinov wrote: post #15

Building a shared runtime for Electron so that each Electron app no longer needs to bundle Node.js and Chromium. It would significantly improve the performance of a framework now used by countless apps. So far as I can tell, this has been on the back burner of the Electron team for many years. I'm surprised it's not a higher priority.

Here's the 6-year-old issue about a shared runtime for Electron:

Idea of runtime mode - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

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

#329

Post by daniellarusso »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #285

Social etiquette for online spaces. Especially during a pandemic year, I'm surprised that this hasn't been more of a topic of discussion. Mostly, if people do talk about social etiquette, it's within the context of not explicitly pissing people off, or looking good to your boss. I've never seen anyone talk about actually having good social interactions online. I've had a few friends change jobs during the pandemic, a…

I think alot of this are symptoms of bad management or inexperienced management dealing with remote work.

I have had to rise to the occasion, and facilitate icebreakers with new hires of other teams (that work with my team).

Their managers thought nothing of directing the new hires to slack and email a handful of strangers.

The companies or individuals that had successfully implemented remote work prior to the pandemic, I think are dealing with it better.

The best tip I read was from the Zapier remote work ‘guide’, to use the Slack giphy add-on, because it is easier to convey emotions via an animated gif versus text.

Of course, it was a major setback when we had to ban it for inappropriate use.

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

#330

Post by Maximus9000 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #319

It IS being worked on, but things move quite slow - and there doesn't seem to have been much progress for decades, but: Cure for hair-loss. Some might say it's just vanity, but if someone could come up with a cure, and sell it affordably, that would be a multi-billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry. Going from quite balding (NW4-NW7 in balding terminology) to a full head of hair makes most guys look a solid 10-…

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with the solutions available today? I see Elon Musk before and after and his procedure appeared to have gone great. Is that just because he could afford a more expensive procedure?
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