Desktop UI beyond wimp.
Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#52There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth.
Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people across various different organizations. Everything in MS Word. I don't even hate MS Word, it's useful and its dominant position isn't entirely undeserved. But holy cow was working together a gigantic pain in the behind. I really started to loathe it (Excel is far worse and did its part too).
This was all with technical people. They could potentially grasp WYSIWYM approaches like LaTeX. Slap git and CI/CD on top and you're where software developers have been 10 years ago. But my industry is still light years away.
Part of it is how Word "just works". But it takes 5 seconds of using it until it doesn't. If LaTeX was more modern and also approachable (very ugly syntax/language. Could learn from Markdown here), technical folk could ditch Word and really upgrade their workflows. I'm sick of Word templates from 2004.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#53Uncensorable publishing.
This is interesting. What mechanisms do you see enabling this?
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#54Building 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.
The webview project fills some of this need, correct? I didn't start using one yet but there were multiple GUI projects leveraging it to create cross-platform application binaries. Link - https://github.com/webview/webview
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#55Elderly care... in fact this pandemic showed precisely the opposite: our elders were neglected, converted into a statistic that dies more then young people. A complete lack of humanity in a lot of developed countries. This is the example we gave to the upcoming generations, we're fucked when it's our turn lol. I've been reflecting a lot on this, and thinking of ways to solve this, but it's not easy - it's bigger than…
Yeah, I've noticed in the US that we've lost sight of the old way of ensuring care for your elders and it makes me sad. I understand that "proper" first world countries should take care of them through social programs, but I'm just surprised it only took us a few generations to completely abandon the obligation to take care of grandma, grandpa, mom, and dad when they get too old to work. My buddy is a latino and as s…
Of course there are other social problems, and inequalities, like racism, unemployment, sexism... but the difference is that these groups still have strength and a voice. The vulnerable groups are exposed and left at the waves of the society.
While people were complaining because they had to stay some weeks inside, you have countries where the elder are still in isolation after 9 months, only to finally get the virus to creep in slowly and start to wipe a lot of them. It's borderline criminal.
It's sad, and it makes me worried for when it will be my turn. If we're this detached from the problems of old age, we won't have a good end.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#56LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives. There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth. Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people acro…
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#57Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#58Mathematics Just think of all the good it's brought and how underfunded it is
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#59A Decentralized Government.
Re: Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
#60Robotic motor learning. It's being worked on, but not nearly to the same extent as machine perception. And yet it's probably the biggest technology gap preventing us from deploying human-equivalent robots in unstructured environments.