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Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

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511–520 of 535 posts

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

#511
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're massively overstating how bad HTML+CSS+JS are, but how do you feel about WebAsm + WebGL as the target?

I'd like to keep the DOM around and not have the web turn into an incomprehensible mess of canvas pixels.

The DOM is perfectly appropriate for modeling documents, and we should indeed keep it around and make use of it where appropriate, but documents aren't all we want to do with the web platform.

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

#512
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you seen Elementary OS? It will suit you if you are a mac person who doesn't really like the no-frills of other linux distros.

Yes I have. The installation process shows a progress bar in an old-school bevel/embossed window, underlined with the filename it's writing. On my computer it showed alerts in the middle. Once started, it's just a normal Linux with sharp edges. Installation of at least one of my programs (probably IntelliJ) crashed, I think I succeeded to fix that using advice from Stack Overflow and the command-line, if I remember. Definitely working, but definitely not the experience we'd like.

It's already a great OS, to be honest, but what about adding 20-100 employees and making it a blockbuster?

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

#513

A single IM platform through which everyone can talk to everyone regardless of their IM service, and I mean I wanna be able to send a message to someone's iMessage from my Battle.net account, and then receive someone's Facebook message on my Slack or something. Obviously IDK how this would be possible, but IM is now broken beyond repair by companies that tried to "fix" it. The list of IM apps on my iPhone keeps growi…

All it would take for this is more love from the existing apps from big corporations (Skype, WhatsApp, etc) towards properly supporting mobile, desktop and web clients. They already have all the users, which is really what makes a messaging platform (I won't use a new app if my family/friends/coworkers aren't there even if it has the best clients everywhere). Skype seems to be trying with the new web and Linux client…

That's not solving the problem in any way though. How do I send a message to a friend's iMessage from Skype?

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

#514
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what do you use it for? I'm intrigued by platforms like MT, but have never had a real use myself.

For my clients, the standard use cases for e-commerce. For example, you might have 100,000 products plus another 5,000 new ones listed per month. Your human error rate might be 3%. When a product arrives, its buyer (the corporate person responsible for signing on the brand) gives it a category and it shows up on the site. So 3% of the new products are erroneously categorised by their buyer. You give X human votes per…

Interesting! Thanks

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

#515
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen Elementary OS? It will suit you if you are a mac person who doesn't really like the no-frills of other linux distros.

Yes I have. The installation process shows a progress bar in an old-school bevel/embossed window, underlined with the filename it's writing. On my computer it showed alerts in the middle. Once started, it's just a normal Linux with sharp edges. Installation of at least one of my programs (probably IntelliJ) crashed, I think I succeeded to fix that using advice from Stack Overflow and the command-line, if I remember.…

When was the last time you checked it out? That's what the team behind it has been doing. From what I understand the last two where all just polish.

I'd love it if you gave it a go and told us how you felt the pain points where.

I'm not involved with the project I just want more users on Linux-based OS.

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

#516

A stack for building web applications in the browser. HTML and CSS are pretty good for documents, but terrible for in-browser GUI apps that we're all building, its just piles of hacks upon hacks. I want someone, probably Google since they own both a major browser and some of the most popular web applications, to re-invent the entire stack. Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits, like QML, Swift, AppKit,…

Completely agree, I can't believe that Visual Basic was more advanced UI design-wise than current tools.

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

#517
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see statically typed files and pipes You mean homogeneous files and pipes - only text, only numbers, etc - that kind of nonsense? Static typing falls apart with heterogeneous containers. Or you are just putting that static typing everywhere because it is so cool - typescript, huh huh?

The idea of types is a little different for files than it would be in a programming language. In a sense, all files are trivially of type [Char], but that's not really what I mean. If program A emits XML on stdout, and program B accepts JSON on stdin, "A | B" should be rejected by the shell. A related feature that might be useful is to be able to register checkers or filters for any file type so that if, say, same ap…

Would this codify that .xyz filename "extensions" are mandatory.. or would a file's "type" not be stored in-band with its name?

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

#518
post #467
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Duckduckgo?

Doesn't work as well. However, i love bangs or the feature to just search from the main field into other websites.

I think the reason its not so good is down to the personalization. Google knows I want to search for Django as a web framework, while DuckDuckGo assumes I want the film.

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

#520

A stack for building web applications in the browser. HTML and CSS are pretty good for documents, but terrible for in-browser GUI apps that we're all building, its just piles of hacks upon hacks. I want someone, probably Google since they own both a major browser and some of the most popular web applications, to re-invent the entire stack. Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits, like QML, Swift, AppKit,…

Man, I'm late posting this, but this is exactly what we're building with Anvil - https://anvil.works

> Superior scripting language

We use Python - on the client and on the server (with rich RPC between the two).

> Steal ideas from GUI-focused languages and toolkits

The biggest such idea is that most layouts should be done visually - Visual Basic had this right, and we've been moving backwards ever since. (The web has three, usually four intermediate representations you have to think through to edit your appearance: Template (->substitution->) HTML (->parsing->) DOM (->CSS render->) visual layout)

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