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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?

#701

Post by AtlasBarfed »

yosamino wrote: post #196

Geothermal Energy. Extremely simplified, all you need to do is drill a hole deep enough for a high temperature difference. Then stick in two pipes, on for sending water down, one for steam to come up. Run a turbine, add a valve to regulate how much water you want to converted into steam to be able to regulate output, enjoy your first mover advantage and price the competition out of the market. ... It's not that I do…

Solar / Wind is dropping 5-10% per year and that probably will continue for another 10 years.

No way geothermal will be cost competitive. Even if it has promise in today's marketplace, by the time you get the project completed solar/wind will have dropped in price 50% or more.

It's the same reason that nuclear projects should only be in research for another 10 years. Once the solar/wind hockey stick plateaus, then you have a rational target for these other alternative energy projects to pursue.

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

#702

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

I've had a very similar rant yearly for over a decade. I used to do it on Slashdot before YC News was a thing. You're not the only one, yet I feel this won't ever change.

Nobody in the entire laptop industry cares or even knows about our complaints. There seems to be practically zero overlap between the professionals that use laptops -- such as software developers -- and the hardware engineers that design the laptops. As you've alluded, it's an insular industry with mostly foreign players such as Clevo in Taiwan.

The market exists though. I suspect it would be profitable too! I regularly buy laptops for about AUD $5,000-$6,000, including the Clevo laptop I'm using now for work.

My requirements are much more mundane than yours, but will similarly never be met:

- Alternative keyboard layouts: Why must a $6K laptop for professionals (or gamers!) do idiotic things such as compress the arrow keys or hide the Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn keys? Why can't I choose the keyboard layout?

- Wider keyboards: I can't stand "gapless" keyboards that make touch typing the rarely used keys difficult. Most laptops reuse the 13-inch model's keyboard on all larger sizes, which wastes enormous amounts of real estate. (My current laptop is wider than my full-size 101-key keyboard, not including the number pad.)

- Decent webcams and microphones: Is there some law that only mobile phones and tablets can have decent cameras?

- Narrow-bezel screens: This is starting to very very slowly become the norm, but is still hit and miss.

- Lightweight power supplies: Only Apple seems to have heard about Gallium Nitride power electronics, everyone else ships their more powerful laptop models with a power supply that is the size and weight of a brick. (My current laptop's brick is 1.9 kg!!!)

- Integrated 5G: I'd like to have Internet connectivity without tethering, just like an iPad.

If anyone from Dell ever reads YC News: I very nearly bought the new Dell XPS 17, but then I saw the keyboard and I immediately cancelled the order: https://i.dell.com/is/image/DellContent//content/dam/global-...

Compare with a Clevo 17 inch laptop keyboard: https://accessoriesales.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1165_...

They seem to have found the room for full-size up/down keys, a number pad, as well as dedicated keys for ins/del/home. I never have to press the "Fn" key in normal usage!

Every few years I look at Dell's top-of-the-line laptop, but decide against buying one because of at least one glaring flaw.

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

#703

Post by randomdata »

canofbars wrote: post #148
tornadofart wrote: post #2

Open source printers

Tbh I think the age of printers is just about over. I haven't had a printer for years and get by just fine. For the rare occasion I want to print something, I just print it at the library or work or a commercial printing store.

Printing on standard paper is of marginal utility. Being able to adapt open source printer designs to print on various objects would change the game.

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

#704

Post by smusamashah »

libertine wrote: post #13

Elderly 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…

Not sure about India (lots of similarities) but in Pakistan people sending parents / grand parents to old homes is really looked upon. Only a fraction of population does that. There are not too many of them. TV shows people in old homes crying for their children abandoning them. I guess that's how most people end up in old homes here.

On the other hand this culture has problems as well. It's not easy to take care of old. When children move out, often because of their own children, unless at least one kid is very happy to take care of now very old parents, it becomes a great question which kid they can live with.

I never really understood the culture of adult kids and old parents living all separately as a way of life. What's considered wrong with living with your parents or keeping them with you?

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

#705

Post by onecommentman »

searine wrote: post #108
dhruvkar wrote: post #9

Regenerating top soil. We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well. At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption. https://www.scientificamer…

This is really not an accurate depiction of the problem. First of all, it may take a 1000 years to naturally create topsoil, but that's not our problem. We have topsoil and can make topsoil much much faster. So how do we preserve, and continue to create topsoil faster than it is depleted. What is top soil? A collection of macro and micronutrients, microorganisms, and organic matter in the first 5-10 inches of soil. E…

We are blessed with a strong stewardship culture in .US farming, and they are incentivized to manage their soil, but what about the land they rent?

Roughly 1/3 of all US farmland is leased.

https://www.fool.com/millionacres/real-estate-investing/inve...

If it is owned by folks in the community, there is some social incentive. Out-of-state landlords? Profit and loss.

A feedback loop for remote landlords to pay the price for letting their land get overworked might be nice. More than just the crop yield loss, but rebuilding the soil for the next generations.

No-till and cover crops are a great approach, but I’ve been told there’s a steep learning curve. But the results are impressive.

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

#706

Post by dartharva »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #398
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…

I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying an Apple product is being on a certain cutting design edge and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac. In the PC world, the consumer space is dominat…

Good take. It's true that Apple's products cater to a fundamentally different market if we observe the nuances; they are more akin to luxury products than normal computers. The PC market demands functional computing devices that are extensible, modifiable and repairable, things Macbooks have virtually no advantage in.

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

#707

Post by roye »

nillium wrote: post #516
wussboy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying according to which articles people click on has already failed as a model for determining truth and relevancy. We need to think of “one weird trick” that will have the same “stunning” effect but without the incentive to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.

FWIW, we are working on this. Almost all of the issues listed in this thread can be traced back to the way aggregators and social networks end up monetizing (or not monetizing) news. We're trying something a little different: https://blog.nillium.com/were-not-an-aggregator/

how do you compare with substack?

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

#708

Post by dartharva »

tomatocracy wrote: post #114

Single subscription payment for news along the lines of the Spotify model. I'd happily pay a single subscription which gave me access to ALL the news websites, and divided payment up based on which articles people click on. Do that without tracking me between the different sites and I'm sold. Pressreader gets close but it only gives you yesterday's print versions (not current online content), it has a few notable gap…

Won't that increase the scope of censorship, something that should be avoided at all costs when it comes to news?

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

#709

Post by tuatoru »

21eleven wrote: post #700
tuatoru wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. So, not longevity, then, but extension of the span of healthy life?

Don't they go hand in hand?

Not necessarily. There are science fiction stories about extension of youth without extension of lifespan, and ancient myths about people cursed to live a long time without youth.

It's possible to imagine health-extending treaments (artificial joints and organs (heart), lung flushes) that don't extend lifespan). We already have treatments that can extend people's lives without health. (Unsuccessful chemotherapy, for one; insulin for type 2 diabetes mellitus, for another.)

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

#710

Post by sergeykish »

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.…

Google ChromeOS

> Chromebook shipments have grown 122% year on year to a total of 9.4 million units in Q3 of 2020. [1]

It covers big market, from tablets [2] to enterprise [3]. And they have AArch64 models [4].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pc-shipments-google-chromebook...

[2] Lenovo Chromebook Duet (10.1") 2 in 1 ($266.79) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...

[3] Dell Latitude Chromebook Enterprise https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/chromebookenterprise/

[4] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

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