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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?

#791

Post by someperson »

gfxgirl wrote: post #415
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #285

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…

I'm sure this is worse because of WFH but I experienced this at FAANG before WFH. The teams are giant, there's a huge list of things to work on, pick one, do it mostly on your own. Loneliest job I ever had. Yea there were co-workers and we'd get lunch and talk but we weren't collaborating, only co-existing.

Do you mind saying which FAANG you found that environment in?

I can understand why some people wouldn't enjoy that environment but a focused workday then a chatty short lunchtime walk sounds like an enjoyable work environment for people like myself.

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

#792

Post by bartligthart »

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…

In the Netherlands we have something like 'Verenigingsleven', loosely translated to club life.

At the end of 19th century workers got better working hours. In the hours after work they set up clubs for everything you can think of. Sports, rabbit breeding clubs, pigeon clubs, shooting clubs etc.

Tot this day it's still a thing, and it's in the canon of the Netherlands.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...

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

#793

Post by finolex1 »

WalterBright wrote: post #698
InvisibleUp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part of this (in the USA, anyways) is due to how modern cities are structured. It used to be, 100 or 200 years ago, that your workplace, your home, and your usual hang-out place were all within reasonable walking distance of each other. It wasn't a huge deal to go out and meet new people, as you'd naturally bump into them every day. Nowadays we have a large portion of people in bedroom communities, is…

I miss living in the dormitory in college. Everything I needed was within a 3 minute walk. The dorm was full of my peers. There was always something fun going on. You had a room just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a sink. Everything else was common. If I was a developer I'd build a "dorm for adults" right next to places like Amazon, but at least around here zoning won't permit it. It's great if you're single and d…

College dorms house a set of people that have been carefully vetted by an admissions committee. I'm not sure if it's possible to recreate such a community and foster trust among a group of adults without some form of prior vetting or selection.

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

#794

Post by jobigoud »

yigithan wrote: post #654

Technology to efficiently visualize any part of the body at atomic level in real time. And, technology to efficiently cut the bonds between atoms in any visualized part of the body. What would something like this require? What is missing? I would expect this to be the next step after MRI/electron microscopy and gamma knife. If this existed, we wouldn’t need vaccines for Covid, we would just shoot the bonds of those .…

What I've been wanting for years/decades is consumer level devices to see inside the body without opening.

We've been doing it for many decades in expensive facilities or doctors offices, it should be democratized by now.

Echography/ultrasound (huge market for pregnant women btw), sports injuries, sprain ankle, muscle ache, stomach pain, I want to see what it looks like inside. Soft tissues, bones, tendons... I want to take hundreds of images of the normal state and compare when something is weird.

Interpretation of images is hard but we can learn it. And it will be much more data that we can feed to ML models to help us make sense of it.

To this day I'm still puzzled that I can't buy a €100 device and look inside myself.

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

#796

Post by marcell »

pochekailov wrote: post #717
faluzure wrote: post #670

Human Longevity. 150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. Peopl…

I really agree with you. I feel the extension of young and healthy life (ideally to infinity) is a number one priority. Surprisingly, people almost always strongly oppose when I just start expressing my views. I never understood this. Wouldn't it be nice to see Mars colonized and terraformed? Wouldn't it be great to see the completion of a Dyson swarm and using 100 % of the Sun energy for some ultra-mega-project we c…

I don’t think extending life to infinity is a good idea. Why would anyone want to live forever? What’s the point?

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

#797

Post by DrRobinson »

Sol- wrote: post #786
faluzure wrote: post #670

Human Longevity. 150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. Peopl…

And then we end up with a Gerontocracy where 100+ year olds are in charge of humanity's future, no thanks. What good is it to live forever if society stagnates intellectually? You may argue this wouldn't happen or that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious. Science advances one funeral at a time and so does perhaps also humanity in general. (That's not to say that I d…

> that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious.

This is of course included in that and we're already seeing some research into it. To prolong life itself isn't a goal if we can't keep healthy, and the brain is part of that.

If we slow down or reverse aging the brain won't deteriorate either. It's all about solving the root cause of why our bodies and mind fails us over time.

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

#798

Post by gnramires »

therealmarv wrote: post #122
diarrhea wrote: post #52

LaTeX. 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…

As somebody who deals with converting documents a lot on a professional level I say: LaTeX is a dead end. It's a horrible format to convert LaTeX to something else except PDF/Print/Images (where it is near perfect of course). You cannot even interchange documents between Word and LaTeX in an easy automated round trip way AFAIK. Btw. I linked before a link to usable Markdown variations for academic papers which use La…

LaTeX should indeed get a little more authoritative IMO. A good start (that comes to mind) would be a convention for "body text" allowing a parser to convert a document between formats, or building a good 'standard library' of common plugins. Its heavy use of macros and non-standard plugins definitely seems like a big problem for conversion, comprehension and even conserving documents. I do find it wonderful for what it is.

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

#799

Post by Too »

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…

To everyone saying this is impossible. This is proven tech and it's actually not uncommon to heat your house like this already today. Depth of a hole in your backyard is around 100-200m and one such hole provides more than enough for one big house.

Payoff for such investment to break even with more basic forms of heating is around 5-10 years in cold northern europe climates. Sadly most people have shorter foresight than that when it comes to economic planning.

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

#800

Post by grsmvg »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #285

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…

I used this for someone’s birthday drinks yesterday: https://getmibo.com/

It’s a space were you can walk around freely, have proximity-based audio volume, and your head is your webcam.

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