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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?

#381
post #138

Cloud tools for musicians. It's a pain setting up a new environment. So many plugins and libraries etc. Also, version control and backup. All manual.

eMagic had a great collaborative DAW plugin in 2001 or so, the year or so before they were bought by Apple. You'd be in a shared chatroom with others, where you'd all see the same DAW view, and could play all the tracks. You'd record a new track locally, and then upload it. It was a cool compromise - in most use cases, you didn't necessarily need to record live, you just wanted to work on the shared project at the same time. I haven't seen that nice of a UX since.

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

#382
post #4

Educating the general population.

Agreed and I'm especially concerned with how little people are taught about IT even though it's an important part of our daily lives. Specifically I think everyone should be thought about:

- cryptography basics

- how the web works (cookies, JavaScript etc.)

- how email works (MTA/MDA/MUA responsibilities, OpenPGP, S/MIME, maybe also SPF/DKIM/DMARC)

- TCP/IP basics

- how computers and operating systems generally work and execute programs

Though I'm not suggesting we should replace other subjects with IT.

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

#383

Space colonization. Where's that moon colony we were promised?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Americans stopped caring about the moon after they planted their flag on it to dunk on the Soviets. When China, Africa, India or whomever else lands on it in the future I hope they knock it down.

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

#384
An sustainable economic system that promotes sustainable consumption and recycling.

That products are design for repairability and sustainability in such a system.

Third an economic system that is not built upon debt slavery but promotes individual freedom in the age of robotics.

That would be the three main things that needs fixing. Plus most countries needs four-seven weeks of vacation per year. This would promote healthier work life balance. Four day work week another one for work life balance.

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

#385
post #296

Sustainable timber. Given it's popularity as a building material (at least in Australia) I'm surprised there isn't more research into genetically modifying trees to grow quickly / have desirable characteristics for construction / need less land and water. I wonder if lab grown timber is a possibility. (I could also imagine a GM'd fast growing tree becoming a ecological disaster though...)

Quick and desirable for construction is a hard one. A slower growth is better as the food is then denser which means it's stronger.

Maybe solution is some type of composite of fast growing fiber material combined with some type of binder...

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

#386

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…

Our work did breakout rooms, so we had a “virtual happy hour” with 70+ people, then 10 other rooms with silly names like some animal and the name of some popular song, and you were encouraged to pick whichever you wanted. Resulted in a pretty even spread of maybe 7 people per room.

It was pretty cool because after we broke into groups I got to have some lighthearted small talk with the company CEO (I work at a 10000+ people company), which felt really neat to me as just a SWE a few management detached from execs, and I don’t think it would have happened pre-pandemic.

Alternatively, we had another “happy hour” organized by a different team that was like you said, 100+ folks with just a few of the most popular (or maybe just gregarious?) people cracking jokes and taking center stage, like a high school dance where a few people are dancing and everyone else awkwardly stands on the sidelines.

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

#387

In-person social organizations. Social isolation is probably the biggest cause of unhappiness in advanced countries. Having a strong social network has lots of advantages including providing better romantic and career opportunities, as well as improving physical and psychological health. Humans have a long history of dishing out lots of money to be parts of strong communities too--country clubs and fraternities have…

> Church goers regularly give up 10% of their (gross) income to be part of that

Having seen the finances for several churches, I can say pretty confidently that most church-goers do not tithe 10%.

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

#388

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

If Lenovo would ship Coreboot Linux laptops that would fit the bill as premium and good laptop with open boot loader.

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

#389
post #35

Better UI's for navigating browsing history. The current approach is 10-20 open tabs, self-categorized bookmarks, and a history feature that lacks full-text search of content.

Having digged through my history on Firefox it seems it has gone backwards... Like now it's something popping up from side and horribly slow. Plus I remember being able to remove sites in navbar by delete... But now that is gone...

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

#390

Premium-feeling laptops that aren't Apple machines. Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective). It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but i…

The XPS 15 is basically that laptop and is only hamstrung by dell being slow to move to Ryzen 4000 mobile chips. Mobile intel runs hot and slow.
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