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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?

#521

Post by gfxgirl »

Waterluvian wrote: post #217

Using ML to detect when I've used words the wrong way. And I don't mean some obnoxiously advertised chrome plugin but a core part of spell check on my devices. Also while I'm here: ios autocomplete is infuriating. It's constantly learning complete jibberish typo words and so I have to reset it every few months.

Google Docs and Mail both have this. I mostly hate it with a fiery passion as it tries to coerce all my writing into some standard bland style.

I like it when it truly catches a real mistake but grammar is more flexible than it believes it is.

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

#522

Post by shoulderfake »

peruvian wrote: post #467
baron816 wrote: post #243

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…

(Pre-covid of course) I think about this often, but then I go for a walk (or in other cities, a drive) and see packed bars and restaurants every night with people from all ages having a good time. Makes me feel like the problem is on me - people are obviously able to make friends and hang out without any special apps beyond what is available now.

Ya my thoughts exactly. People are definitely hanging out. The ones that aren't simply don't want to.

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

#523

Post by SyzygistSix »

acd wrote: post #401

That all parents must attend parenting classes. We have drivings licenses to drive a car. Yet there’s no such skill requirements for parents on how to raise children. Cost of dealing with miss raised children is very high.

I think we would do better by allowing parents more time with their kids by reducing working hours. By all means, access to better parenting media would be good. Maybe give parents some time to attend those classes or read/watch parenting media rather than insist they work 50+ hours a week or work two jobs.

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

#524

Post by klaudius »

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-…

Balding is not vanity. It is a marker for serious health problems. Balding men are several times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, for example.

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

#525

Post by thereIsHope »

Ending the subsidies to the animal agriculture lobby, the industry that is the most destructive to the environment and causes unnecessary horrible suffering to trillions of sentient beings every year. It's the cause of 90% of deforestation worldwide, the main cause of the 6th massive species extinction (due to deforestation), water pollution (75 billion cows, pigs and chickens produce tons of manure that are dumped in our rivers and leaked into underground water), a leading cause of green house gas emissions (from 14% to 60% depending on the study), one of the main causes of air pollution (manure is also sprayed to the air and we breathe it), main cause of ocean dead zones and pesticide pollution (because breeding and growing animals requires waaay more crops than using crops directly to feed people) etc etc etc Yet tax payers money, billions of dollars in the USA alone every year, is being gifted to this extremely unsustainable and harmful industry, to compensate for their loss of sales (as consumers educate themselves, find out the truth behind this cruel toxic industry and move towards more ethical and sustainable choices), which is basically corporate welfare and doesn't happen with other industries. If a car manufacturer's sales decline, do you want your tax money to go to fund their company as corporate welfare or do you want your taxes used for hospitals, schools, roads etc? Why are we wasting billions of needed dollars to maintain the lifestyle of the owners of CAFOs (concentrated aninal feed operations, that is, big industrial animal farms -subsidies don't go to small farmers for the most part-) Look up Agriculture Fairness Alliance if you want to see the data and learn more about the very critical and urgent task of ending these absurd destructive subsidies and instead help farmers transition to sustainable and healthy business models that will allow us to avoid the worst consequences of climate change if we do switch fast enough

So yeah I am shocked that this very urgent matter is not being discussed and challenged yet at a mainstream level

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

#526

Post by TwoBit »

Jemaclus wrote: post #443
Klonoar wrote: post #379

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…

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching. Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works . Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.…

> shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes

Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.

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

#527

Post by jacknews »

Post-capitalism, post-market economies.

I think at this point it's clear that market economies are good at getting people out of bed, and for innovating, finding new markets, optimizing for efficiency, etc, and generating 'wealth'.

But they are perhaps not good at creating the right kind of wealth, spreading it fairly, fostering healthy societies, respecting the environment, optimizing for resilience, sustainability, etc.

It isn't really fixed by what we do now; tacking on taxes by government - which is always seen as 'lazy bureaucrats stealing from wealth creators', etc.

We should be researching, and testing alternatives, built into the very fabric of how economies are structured, along with ideas like Georgeist land taxes, universal basic equity/dividend etc.

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

#528

Post by geoah »

m463 wrote: post #501
ineptech wrote: post #437

Personal server. If there were an open source project that made running server applications (personal blog, email, game server, file backups, mastodon, etc) easy for non-technical people, it would open up whole new use cases (in the same sense there are kinds of software now that wouldn't have made sense before everyone carried around a phone). It would also be a whalefall for the hosted vm industry if it caught on,…

There is unraid (which I haven't tried) I'm pretty happy with proxmox - apparently lots of people use the LXC appliances.

I’m honestly amazed at how bad the ux of unraid is. It does a ton of things I’ll give them that. But coming from synology’s dsm (xpenology) the experience has not been good. The lack of a web file manager is mind boggling.

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

#529

Post by sneak »

canofbars wrote: post #162
sneak wrote: post #6

Uncensorable publishing.

We have a bunch of things like this. Torrents and data on the blockchain can't really be removed. The problem with a lot of uncensorable publishing is the average person does not want to be storing and distributing someone elses illegal content.

Most people read on mobile. There's no simple way to watch torrents on mobile.

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

#530

Post by vinhboy »

jbay808 wrote: post #414

Standardized interchangeable packaging for consumer goods. Ever been to a book store in Japan? Practically every book is the same size. As a result, bookshelves also are designed to be the right size to optimally fit books. This allows people to fit more books in small homes. It makes books easier to transport in book-sized boxes and book-sized bags too. You can get perfectly-fitting reusable cloth covers to protect…

Spot on. Why don't we have milk crates for Amazon deliveries?
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