Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by rakoo » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

cromulent wrote: post #176

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…

If you expect your friend to accept having something plugged all the time, I assume you'd be ok with having a similar device at your place running their backup, right ?

In that case, you can buy a NAS for you, have them buy one for them, backup stuff on your own NAS and let the replication from your NAS to their NAS happen in the background.

Bonus: backups/restore/browsing are much faster, and you can more easily accommodate multiple people wanting to backup at the same place -- instead of one device at your place for each of your friend, it's only one at your place to which all your friend's NAS backup to.

I use Synology NAS, not with this setup, but I know they have the software to do exactly this.

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

#382

Post by crdb » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #357

crdb wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could, but it's time consuming and I'd have to deal with the IRS. By not operating in either the US or the EU, I save myself a lot of administrative trouble and potential tax liabilities.

So you essentially just want a broker between yourself and MT? If all I have to do is provide you an account, and you pay up front with bitcoin, I'm happy to do this for you with 25% premium. All it involves for me is going out and buying prepaid debit cards of whatever amount and attaching them to the account. I fill them up with 75% of whatever dollar amount you send me.

Thanks for offering, but I doubt this methodology will scale. We really need a stable company with a product we can trust will both be around in 5 years and that can handle large volumes of tasks.

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

#383

Post by jpt4 » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

neilsharma wrote: post #373

jpt4 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3, 4, and the emotional support aspect of 2 read like you are pining for matrimony.

haha perhaps matrimony would address some of the issues (I am starting to approach THAT age). I'm just a big picture guy and over the years, I don't think that tech has helped that much in addressing some of the more fundamental life problems. Some exceptions (skype to chat with relatives abroad, facebook/social apps to a small extent, my hospital finally creating a website, youtube fitness tutorials, etc). Tech can…

Large cities rather self-consciously (as any NYC comedian will tell you) run on the razor's edge of minimum comfort for the maximum amount of productive people, ruthlessly filtering for those who can withstand the continual mental, physical, and social penalties with vitality to spare.

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

#384

Post by r3boots » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

Good FOSS 3+ axis CAM software, preferably OS-agnostic.

There's a quiet FOSS revolution happening in machine tool motion control: several usable CAD packages (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, SolveSpace, to name a few), a powerful motion controller (LinuxCNC), even a few open embedded servo drives. But flexible, powerful CAM to glue these parts together seems to be the type of tough niche problem, requiring a lot of domain knowledge, where anybody capable of taking it on wants to get paid for their work. A lot like the EDA field before KiCad gathered some momentum.

Not to ignore the work put into PyCAM and other small efforts in this space. It's definitely a start.

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

#385

Post by omnimus » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

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 have master in graphicdesign/ux, i am ok with tech so i started to do programming a lot (to the point that economicaly its much better for me to just program than design). I am also big on open-source.

There is huge problem with open-source design. The kind of design you are talking about needs to be centralized. Design is about bigger picture, about consistency and overall aim. There are so many design solutions to achieve the same thing... usualy what ends up happening is that the dev implementing it just does it in his way. When this piles up it harms the project. I understand the dev implementing it, he has all the right. But overall its realy hard. And its a social problem, not technical one.

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

#386

Post by borplk » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

My item added to that would be this,

"There's a universal dedicated storage mechanism for the state of the operating system and its related packages similar to a SQL database."

It really annoys me how ad-hoc state and values are treated in an operating system with ASCII config files.

You can always have means of human-friendliness even if the underlying data is more strictly structured such as in a database but you can't go the other way around.

Imagine almost like a SQL-like language to provision/configure/restore an operating system.

   SELECT name FROM installed_packages WHERE installed_date > '2016-01-01 00:00:00';

   BEGIN;
   DROP FROM installed_packages WHERE package_name = "python2";
   INSTALL PACKAGE WHERE package_name = "python3";
   COMMIT;

Operating systems are still stuck with an over-zealous "the unix way or the highway" mentality of cobbling together fragile ad-hoc config files with arbitrary config languages.

Each package invents their own config language and forces it down your throat.

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

#387

Post by omnimus » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

EnderMB wrote: post #319

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.

I have differend position. As designer is extremely hard to help on open souce. And i know many designers who think the same. Usualy it ends up with nice logo. Ux - every dev wants to do on its own.

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

#388

Post by cypher543 » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

zevv wrote: post #129

A slim, networked, pocked sized computer with a physical keyboard, running android or Linux. These used to exist - albeit disguised as phones - but the marketing department decided we don't need no friggin keyboards, and remove everything but the touchscreen and call it a tablet. The result is a consume-only device, on which it is all but impossible to input large amounts of text. Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 3/4, HTC…

I loved the Palm Pre's form factor. The size, the sliding hardware keyboard, the way it felt like I was holding a smooth stone in my hand. It's probably the best phone I've ever owned, hardware-wise.

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

#389

Post by borplk » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #92

A programming language with the easyness of dealing with state and effects of a mainstream language and with the guarantees you get from a pure functional language

We need more pragmatic people (and less academic) in the programming language scene.

Some of the people I see remind me of a doctor that forces you to learn all about the chemical composition of a pill and its history before he lets you take the pill.

You want the damn pain gone. He insists oh the formula is beautiful you wont believe it you have to see it first.

This is what people do in FP.

You want to promote FP? Make a functional programming language that "industrial" programmers who glue UI to database fields use to get shit done fast and see what happens.

But oh no first everyone must masturbate to your beautiful monads and get their FP permit.

FP needs a PHP.

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

#390

Post by alain94040 » Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

tajen wrote: post #307

irishcoffee wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO, is your issue with a decent windows manager? I work on RHEL systems daily, and under the hood (sysd arguments not withstanding) its no more or less clunky than any other 'distro' out there. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what exactly you're looking to buy?

Yes it could be summarized as a window manager if it takes over all aspects of managing the computer through a GUI. I develop with Mac OS and deploy my cloud services on Debian. I don't know much about Linux beyond apt-get upgrade, nginx, Ansible and Java apps. I know when I install Mac OS X that the progress bar is gray with no text on the screen, which means I don't need to dive into the technical details at any po…

There is this great UI stack that is open source, has the latest and greatest animations. Its API is even used by thousands of developers already. It's called Android. Maybe it's time to ditch X11 and move to a more modern stack. Problem solved.

Ps: during the transition, you could support both. And of course the touch aspect needs to be cleaned up but it would still be a much better codebase to start from.